Full-Spectrum Dominance

Even without being a historian (you or me), it’s easy to recognize seminal figures in U.S. history who have articulated the basic ideology behind what has grown to be a maniacal notion of what a world power can and should be. For instance, not very long after the American Revolution and the purported end of the Colonial Era, President James Monroe established the Monroe Doctrine, claiming the entire Western Hemisphere as being within America’s sphere of influence and warning others across the Atlantic not to intervene. Later in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln responded to the Southern Secession by launching the American Civil War, establishing that no state could leave the Union. A period of isolationism followed, broken when the U.S. joined WWI (unclear to me why the U.S. fought that war). Woodrow Wilson laid out the principles of liberal internationalism in 1917:

The American military, the president told a joint session of Congress, was a force that could be used to make the world “safe for democracy” … Wilson’s doctrine was informed by two main ideas: first, the Progressive Era fantasy that modern technologies and techniques — especially those borrowed from the social sciences — could enable the rational management of foreign affairs, and second, the notion that “a partnership of democratic nations” was the surest way to establish a “steadfast concert for peace.”

from “Empire Burlesque” by Daniel Bessner (Harper’s Magazine, July 2022)

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Note that that bit of rhetoric, “safe for democracy,” has been trotted out for over a century now yet shows no sign of losing its mojo. It helps, of course, that no one really knows what democracy is anymore. The public is subjected to relentless narrative spin and propaganda, bread and circuses, and inferior to nonexistent education that muddies the concept beyond recognition. Ten months prior to the U.S. entry into the next world war, influential American magazine publisher (Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated) Henry Luce added further justification for growing U.S. geopolitical ambitions:

… the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the United States, which had already been aiding the Allies, officially entered the war. Over the next four years, a broad swath of the foreign policy elite arrived at Luce’s conclusion [from just before the war]: the only way to guarantee the world’s safety was for the United States to dominate it. By the war’s end, Americans had accepted this righteous duty, of becoming, in Luce’s words, “the powerhouse … lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.”

from “Empire Burlesque” by Daniel Bessner (Harper’s Magazine, July 2022)

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There has since been no going back, only solidification and strengthening of what is called The American Century (thanks again to Luce) but really represents the spread of a global empire. So much for the end of colonialism, now pursued primarily through other means but still reverting to overt militarism whenever and wherever necessary. Just like civilizations, empires have come and gone throughout human history with power centers shifting somewhat reliably if unpredictably. The American Empire will undoubtedly join others in the dustbin of history no matter whether anyone survives the 21st century to survey the wreckage. Moreover, the illusion that The American Century can be extended is handily dispelled by the Macrofutilist, noting that corporations are leading the charge into the abyss:

Humans have no agency in this world dominated, at every institution and at every level of those institutions, by corporations and states that function as corporations. Under the rubric of the corporation, every public good or resource is under relentless exploitation, subject only to the fictional “control” by political or legal structures. Bolstered by near-total capture of every ancillary human social event or condition, corporations are wonderfully positioned to lead humanity off its cliff of resource degradation and impending scarcity … The horror is so monumental, so vast in its iniquity, so above any moderation, so all-consuming in its reach, so supreme in its command, that the subject of corporate ownership of the means of species destruction risks becoming boring. Who has the right to speak of “resistance” or “change” or “giving back” when all forms of social control are under obdurate corporate ownership?

from Corporations Are the Perfect Vehicle to Drive Humanity to Its Self-Extinction

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Although it’s impossible to establish beyond reasonable doubt who’s actually driving the bus — corporations, the military-industrial complex (those two form a tautology by now), elected members of government, the Deep State, or some other nefarious cabal — it’s probably fair to say that members of each group have taken into their hearts the desire for full-spectrum dominance. That term originally meant complete military control of a theater of war. However, as its very name frankly admits, activities of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government signal a new style of Hobbesian war of all against all has begun. Indeed, what I used to call creeping fascism no longer needs the modifier creeping. The end game may have finally arrived, the evidence being everywhere if one has the fortitude to look.

The Inversion Fallacy

A recent episode of the Dark Horse Podcast introduced what appeared initially to be a new bit of lingo: the Inversion Fallacy. I’ve discussed logical fallacies and hidden biases in the past, and this one bears directly my multipart blog series “Dissolving Reality” from 2015 where I put forward the Ironic and Post-Ironic mindsets. The Ironic is more nearly the reversal of meaning yet tracks with the Inversion Fallacy. Without getting too hung up on the pointless minutia of terminology (trying to distinguish between, say, reversal, inversion, transposition, contradiction, and opposition), inversion means to turn something upside-down or on its head. It’s also related to devil’s advocacy, topsy-turvy argumentation, and is not … is too! squabbles where a thing becomes its opposite. Several pundits and commentators have lost my readership because of frequent forays into disingenuous reverse argumentation. I simply lack patience.

As described on Dark Horse, the Inversion Fallacy occurs when a thing or idea is treated as equivalent to its inverse. One example now commonplace in Wokedom is to accuse someone of being racist and then insist denial is proof of racism. (Also heard this particular example called a Kafka Trap, also on Dark Horse). As math, the equation would be either x = 1/x or x = –x. Inversion is the former, reversal the latter. The x = –x formulation (the Ironic) suggests that an idea or thing automatically invokes (i.e., brings into being) its opposite, especially through the use of sarcasm. Here’s the old joke illustrating the point:

Professor of linguistics hold forth before a class of undergraduates, “In language as in mathematics, a double negative is a positive. But in no mathematics or language does a double positive equal a negative.”

To which a student replies dryly, “Yeah, right ….”

The modest advantage of the x = 1/x formulation is that when x = 0, the equation has no meaning because dividing by zero is … undefined. The obvious example is the oft-quoted (and misquoted) Vietnam War nonsense, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” That’s dividing by zero in a nutshell.

The difference between the two formulations does not IMO prevent the fallacy from working. My suspicion is that multiple ways of observing, describing, and naming the fallacy exist. An attribute of the Post-Ironic is that the tension between thing and not thing is expanded to include a fluid spectrum of competing positions. Whether reversal or inversion, Ironic or Post-Ironic, the common element is the necessity to set aside obvious cognitive dissonance and enter a state of flux where meanings cannot be fixed. Just a few blog posts ago, I cited George Orwell’s famous formulation: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” Requires Orwellian Doublethink to accept those propositions.

Lingua Nova 03

Arranged from short to long.

A collective noun not in use but probably should be: a harassment of technologies. Needs no explanation.

From the Episcopal Church: the church key. A euphemism for a bottle opener for alcoholic beverages with bottle caps.

From various YouTube channels offering cinema reviews: memberberries. A cheap form of fan service, typically citing familiar nostalgic bit, lines, or characters to trigger a pleasing memory of previous TV shows and films. Generally used derogatorily.

Not new but new to me at least: ramekin. A small dish in which food can be baked and served. Reminded me of the far less commonplace hottle, which is a single-serving glass carafe for hot water, tea, or coffee. Here are representative pics:

From nowhere in particular: the poverty draft. An open secret (arguably, not really lingua nova) that recruitment into the U.S. military is aided substantially by the poverty of potential recruits. Thus, joining a branch of the armed services is not necessarily because of ideological agreement with its functions or an earnest desire to serve but instead — at the risk of life and limb — to get education and training not otherwise available or to expunge debt from more traditional educational institutions.

From Thomas Chatterton Williams (whom I might criticize for a number of reasons, but I’ll abjure): the Age of Theory. The modern age (pick a start date) has been called many things. I tend to call it the Age of Abundance since that quintessential characteristic is now decidedly on the wane. (Age of Oil and Fossil Fuel Era are essentially the same thing.) Age of Theory refers to PoMo reliance on theory and abstraction as a means of understanding and interpreting nearly everything. I’ve blogged quite a bit about living in our heads as distinguished from living in our bodies (i.e., being embodied). My book blogging through Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is most on point (see the McGilchrist tag).

From Peruvian writer and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa: the truth in the lies (translations vary — sometimes given as the truth of lies). Although Vargas Llosa is referencing fiction (writers writing about writing), the notion that a lie can reveal a more significant truth is at the heart of communications. Whether through advertising, public relations, entertainment, politicking, or propaganda, shaping opinion with use of subtle-to-obvious (mis-)framing or with straight-up lies and falsehoods is the contemporary information landscape, though many attempt to adhere rigorously to truth and reality. Separating malefactors from truth-tellers is the warrant and responsibility of any sovereign intellect — a formidable and ongoing task in an increasingly deranging public sphere.

Pocket Reality, pt. 3

Following up the two previous entries in this series, the Feb. 2022 issue of Scientific American has a cover article by Adam Becker called “The Origins of Space and Time” with the additional teaser “Does spacetime emerge from a more fundamental reality?” (Oddly, the online title is different, making it awkward to find.) I don’t normally read Scientific American, which has become a bit like Time and Newsweek in its blurb-laden, graphics-heavy presentation intended patronizingly for general-interest readers. In fact, I’ll quote the pullout (w/o graphics) that summarizes the article:

How Spacetime Emerges. Space and time are traditionally thought of as the backdrop to the universe. But new research suggests they might not be fundamental; instead spacetime could be an emergent property of a more basic reality, the true backdrop to the cosmos. This idea comes from two theories that attempt to bridge the divide between general relativity and quantum mechanics. The first, string theory, recasts subatomic particles as tiny loops of vibrating string. The second, loop quantum gravity, envisions spacetime being broke down into chunks — discrete bits that combine to create a seemingly smooth continuum.

Being a layperson in such matters, I’ll admit openly that I don’t fully grasp the information presented. Indeed, every breathless announcement from CERN (or elsewhere) about a new subatomic particle discovery or some research group’s new conjectures into quantum this-or-that I typically greet passively at best. Were I a physicist or cosmologist, my interest would no doubt be more acute, but these topics are so far removed from everyday life they essentially become arcane inquiries into the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. I don’t feel strongly enough to muster denunciation, but discussion of another aspect of pocket reality is worth some effort.

My understanding is that the “more basic reality, the true backdrop” discussed in the article is multidimensionality, something Eric Weinstein has also been grappling with under the name Geometric Unity. (Bizarrely, Alex Jones has also raved about interdimensional beings.) If the universe indeed has several more undetectable dimensions (as memory serves, Weinstein says as many as 14) and human reality is limited to only a few, potentially breaking through to other dimension and/or escaping boundaries of a mere four is tantalizing yet terrifying. Science fiction often explores these topics, usually in the context of space travel and human colonization of the galaxy. As thought experiments, fictional stories can be authentically entertaining and enjoyable. Within nonfiction reality, desire to escape off-world or into extra- or interdimensionality is an expression of desperation considering just how badly humans have fucked up the biosphere and guaranteed an early extinction for most species (including ours). I also chafe at the notion that this world, this reality, is not enough and that pressing forward like some unstoppable chemical reaction or biological infiltration is the obvious next step.

The Yahtzee Protocol

Heard a remark (can’t remember where) that most these days would attack as openly ageist. Basically, if you’re young (let’s say below 25 years of age), then it’s your time to shut up, listen, and learn. Some might even say that true wisdom doesn’t typically emerge until much later in life, if indeed it appears at all. Exceptions only prove the rule. On the flip side, energy, creativity, and indignation (e.g., “it’s not fair! “) needed to drive social movements are typically the domain of those who have less to lose and everything to gain, meaning those just starting out in adult life. A full age range is needed, I suppose, since society isn’t generally age stratified except at the extremes (childhood and advanced age). (Turns out that what to call old people and what counts as old is rather clumsy, though probably not especially controversial.)

With this in mind, I can’t help but to wonder what’s going on with recent waves of social unrest and irrational ideology. Competing factions agitate vociferously in favor of one social/political ideology or another as though most of the ideas presented have no history. (Resemblances to Marxism, Bolshevism, and white supremacy are quite common. Liberal democracy, not so much.) Although factions aren’t by any means populated solely by young people, I observe that roughly a decade ago, higher education in particular transformed itself into an incubator for radicals and revolutionaries. Whether dissatisfaction began with the faculty and infected the students is impossible for me to assess. I’m not inside that intellectual bubble. However, urgent calls for radical reform have since moved well beyond the academy. A political program or ideology has yet to be put forward that I can support fully. (My doomer assessment of what the future holds forestalls knowing with any confidence what sort of program or ideology into which to pour my waning emotional and intellectual energy.) It’s still fairly simple to criticize and denounce, of course. Lots of things egregiously wrong in the world.

My frustration with what passes for political debate (if Twitter is any indication) is the marked tendency to immediately resort to comparisons with Yahtzees in general or Phitler in particular. It’s unhinged and unproductive. Yahtzees are cited as an emotional trigger, much like baseless accusations of racism send everyone scrambling for cover lest they be cancelled. Typically, the Yahtzee/Phitler comparison or accusation itself is enough to put someone on their heels, but wizened folks (those lucky few) recognize the cheap rhetorical trick. The Yahtzee Protocol isn’t quite the same as Godwin’s Law, which states that the longer a discussion goes on (at Usenet in the earliest examples) increases the inevitability likelihood of someone bringing up Yahtzees and Phitler and ruining useful participation. The protocol has been deployed effectively in the Russian-Ukraine conflict, though I’m at a loss to determine in which direction. The mere existence of the now-infamous Azov Battalion, purportedly comprised of Yahtzees, means that automatically, reflexively, the fight is on. Who can say what the background rate of Yahtzee sympathizers (whatever that means) might be in any fighting force or indeed the general population? Not me. Similarly, what threshold qualifies a tyrant to stand beside Phitler on a list of worst evers? Those accusations are flung around like cooked spaghetti thrown against the wall just to see what sticks. Even if the accusation does stick, what possible good does it do? Ah, I know: it makes the accuser look like a virtuous fool.

Let’s Be Evil, pt. 06

Here’s a deal many people would take: you get to live in the First World and enjoy the ample albeit temporary benefits of a modern, post-industrial economy, but to enable you, people in the Third World must be brutally exploited, mostly out of sight and out of mind. (Dunno what to say about the Second World; comparisons are typically hi-lo. And besides, that Cold War nomenclature is probably badly out of date.) There no need to say “would take,” of course, because that’s already the default in the First World. Increasingly, that’s also the raw deal experienced by the lower/working class in the United States, which now resembles other failed states. People without means are driven into cycles of poverty or channeled into the prison-industrial complex to labor for a pittance. That’s not enough, though. The entirety of public health must be gamed as a profit center for Big Pharma, which wrings profit out of suffering just like the U.S. prison system. That’s one of the principal takeaways from the last two years of pandemic. Indeed, from a capitalist perspective, that’s what people are for: to feed the beast (i.e., produce profit for the ownership class). For this very reason — the inhumanity of exploiting and subjugating people — critics of capitalism believe the ruthlessness of the profit motive cannot be tempered and the economic system is ripe for replacement.

Arguments that, “yeah, sure, it’s a flawed system but it’s still the best one on offer” are unconvincing. Rather, they’re a rationalization for lack of imagination how a better, more equitable system might be developed and tried. Human nature, frankly as “animal” as any other animal, also discourages anyone from rising above social conditioning or breaking from the herd. Instead, history forces fundamental change only when decrepit systems no longer function. Late-stage capitalism, having reached nearly the full extent of easily exploitable resources (materials and labor), is creaking and groaning under the weight of its inbuilt perpetual growth imperative. The dynamic is nonnegotiable, as measures of gross national product (GNP) are only acceptable if a positive index, the higher the better. Whereas previous social/economic systems failed in fits and starts, transitioning gradually from one to the next, it’s doubtful capitalism can morph gracefully into a new system given its momentum and totalizing character.

For many millennia, slavery was the solution to labor needs, which became morally intolerable especially in the 19th century but was really only driven underground, never truly extinguished. That’s the point of the first paragraph above. Terminology and mechanisms have sometimes been swapped out, but the end result is scarcely less disagreeable for those on the bottom rungs. Globalization brought practically the entire world population into the money economy, which had been irrelevant to peasant and subsistence societies. Apologists often say that the spread of capitalism enabled those peoples to be lifted out of poverty. That’s a ridiculous claim while wealth/income inequality continues to launch the ultrarich into the stratosphere (literally in the infamous case of at least a couple billionaires) compared to the masses. Yes, refrigerators and cell phones are now commonplace, but those are hardly the best measures of human wellbeing.

So what’s person of conscience to do? Born into a socioeconomic system from which there is no escape — at least until it all collapses — is there any way not to be evil, to not exploit others? Hard to say, considering we all consume (in varying degrees) products and services obtained and provided through the machinations of large corporations exploiting humans and nature on our behalf. When it all does collapse in a heap of death and destruction, don’t look for high-minded reexamination of the dynamics that led to that endgame. Rather, it will be everyone for themselves in a futile attempt to preserve life against all odds.

The Purse Seine

Here’s a term I daresay most won’t recognize: the purse seine. My introduction was as the title of a poem by Robinson Jeffers. More generally, the term refers to a net drawn between two fishing boats to encircle a school of fish. The poem captures something both beautiful and terrifying, drawing an analogy between a fishing net and government power over human populations gathered into cities (confined by economic necessity?) rather than subsisting more simply on the bounty of nature. Whether Jeffers intends a traditional agrarian setting or a deeper, ancestral, hunter-gatherer orientation is unclear and probably doesn’t matter. The obvious counterpoint he names plainly: Progress (capital P).

My own analogy to the purse seine is more pedestrian: cloth masks strung between two ears and drawn over the face to encircle the breath in futile hope of impeding the respiratory virus that has impacted everyone worldwide for the last two years (needs no name — are you living under a rock?). Like a seine allows water to flow through, cloth masks allow airflow so that one can breathe. Otherwise, we’d all be wearing gas masks and/or hazmat suits 24/7. And therein lies the problem: given the tiny particle size of the pathogen, cloth and paper masks are akin (yes, another analogy) to using a chain-link fence to hold back the wind. That’s not what fences (or face masks) are designed to do. More robust N95 masks do little better for the very same reason. Gotta be able to breathe. Other pandemic mitigation efforts such as social distancing, lock downs, and vaccines suffer from similar lack of efficacy no matter how official pronouncements insist otherwise. The pandemic has come in similar, unstoppable, year-over-year waves in locations/states/nations that took few or no precautions and those that imposed the most egregious authoritarian measures. The comparative numbers (those not purposely distorted beyond recognition, anyway) tell the story clearly, as anyone with a principled understanding of infectious disease could well have anticipated considering humans are a hypersocial species packed into dense population centers (compared to our agrarian past).

Although these are statements of the obvious, at least to me, I’ve broken my previous silence on the pandemic and surmise I’m probably tempting the censors and trolls. I’m not giving advice, and others can of course disagree; I’ve no particular issue with principled disagreement. Decide for yourself what to do. I do have a problem, however, with self-censorship (read: cowardice). So although this blog post is a rather oblique way of saying that the putative consensus narrative is a giant, shifting pile of horse pucky (disintegrating further into nothingness with each passing day), please exercise your synapses and evaluate the evidence best you can despite official channels (and plenty of water carriers) herding and bullying everyone toward conclusions that make utterly no sense in terms of public health.

Synthetic Knowledge

I had that dream again. You know the one: I have to go take a final test in a class I forgot about, never attended or dropped from my schedule. Most higher-ed students have this dream repeatedly, as do former students (or for those who take the educational enterprise seriously as a life-long endeavor, perpetual students). The dream usually features open-ended anxiety because it’s all anticipation — one never steps into the classroom to sit for the test. But this time, the twist was that the final test transformed into a group problem-solving seminar. The subject matter was an arcane post-calculus specialty (maybe I’ve seen too many Big Bang Theory whiteboards strewn with undecipherable equations), and the student group was stumped trying to solve some sort of engineering problem. In heroic dream mode, I recontextualized the problem despite my lack of expertise, which propelled the group past its block. Not a true test of knowledge or understanding, since I hadn’t attended class and didn’t learn its subject matter, but a reminder that problem-solving is often not straight application of factors easily set forth and manipulable.

Outside of the dream, in my morning twilight (oxymoron alert), I mused on the limitations of tackling social issues like there were engineering problems, which typically regards materials, processes, and personnel as mere resources to be marshaled and acted upon to achieve a goal but with little consideration — at least in the moment — of downstream effects or indeed human values. The Manhattan Project is a prime example, which (arguably) helped the allied powers win WWII but launched the world into the Atomic Age, complete with its own Cold War and the awful specter of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Borrowing a term from economics, it’s easy to rationalize negative collateral effects in terms of creative destruction. I object: the modifier creative masks that the noun is still destruction (cracked eggs needed to make omelets, ya know). Otherwise, maybe the term would be destructive creation. Perhaps I misunderstand, but the breakthrough with the Manhattan Project came about through synthesis of knowledge that lay beyond the purview of most narrowly trained engineers.

That is precisely the problem with many social ills today, those that actually have solutions anyway. The political class meant to manage and administer views problems primarily through a political lens (read: campaigning) and is not especially motivated to solve anything. Similarly, charitable organizations aimed at eradicating certain problems (e.g., hunger, homelessness, crime, educational disadvantage) can’t actually solve any problems because that would be the end of their fundraising and/or government funding, meaning that the organization itself would cease. Synthetic knowledge needed to solve a problem and then terminate the project is anathema to how society now functions; better that problems persist.

Past blog posts on this topic include “Techies and Fuzzies” and “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” each of which has a somewhat different emphasis. I’m still absorbed by the conflict between generalists and specialists while recognizing that both are necessary for full effectiveness. That union is the overarching message, too, of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2010), the subject of many past blog posts.

Hypercomplexity and Casuistry

Ask parents what ambitions they harbor for their child or children and among the most patterned responses is “I just want them to be happy.” I find such an answer thoughtless and disingenuous, and the insertion of the hedge just to make happiness sound like a small ask is a red herring. To begin with, for most kids still in their first decade, happiness and playfulness are relatively effortless and natural so long as a secure, loving environment is provided. Certainly not a default setting, but it’s still quite commonplace. As the dreamy style of childhood cognition is gradually supplanted by supposedly more logical, rational, adult thinking, and as children become acquainted with iniquities of both history and contemporary life, innocence and optimism become impossible to retain. Cue the sullen teenager confronting the yawning chasm between desire and reality. Indeed, few people seem to make the transition into adulthood knowing with much clarity how to be happy in the midst of widespread travail and suffering. Instead, young adults frequently substitute self-destructive, nihilistic hedonism, something learned primarily (says me) from the posturing of movie characters and the celebrities who portray them. (Never understood the trope of criminals hanging at nightclubs, surrounded by drug addicts, nymphos, other unsavory types, and truly awful music, where they can indulge their assholery before everything inevitably goes sideways.)

Many philosophies recommend simplicity, naturalness, and independence as paths to happiness and moral rectitude. Transcendentalism was one such response to social and political complexities that spoil and/or corrupt. Yet two centuries on, the world has only gotten more and more complex, pressing on everyone especially for information processing in volume and sophistication that does not at all come naturally to most and is arguably not part of our evolutionary toolkit. Multiple social issues, if one is to engage them fairly, hinge on legalistic arguments and bewildering wordplay that render them fundamentally intractable. Accordingly, many waive away all nuance and adopt pro forma attitudes. Yet the airwaves, social media, the Internet, and even dinner conversations are suffused by the worst sorts of hypercomplexity and casuistry that confound even those who traffic regularly in such rhetoric. It’s a very long way from “I just want to be happy.”

The Low-Information Citizen

With each successive election cycle, I become more cynical (how is that even possible?) about the candidates and their supposed earnest mission to actually serve the public interest. The last couple cycles have produced a new meme that attempts to shift blame for poor governance to the masses: the low-information voter. Ironically, considering the fact that airwaves, magazines, books, public addresses, online venues, and even dinner conversations (such as they still exist if diners aren’t face-planted in their screens) are positively awash in political commentary and pointless debate and strategizing, there is no lack of information available. However, being buried under a déluge of information is akin to a defense attorney hiding damning discovery in an ocean of irrelevance, so I have some sympathy for voters who are thwarted in attempts to make even modestly informed decisions about political issues.

Multiply this basic relationship across many facets of ordinary life and the end result is the low-information citizen (also low-information consumer). Some parties (largely sellers of things, including ideas) possess a profusion of information, whereas useful, actionable information is hidden from the citizen/consumer by an information avalanche. For example, onerous terms of an insurance contract, debt instrument, liability waiver, or even routine license agreement are almost never read prior to signing or otherwise consenting; the acronym tl;dr (stands for “too long; didn’t read”) applies. In other situations, information is withheld entirely, such as pricing comparisons one might undertake if high-pressure sales tactics were not deployed to force potential buyers in decisions right here, right now, dammit! Or citizens are disempowered from exercising any critical judgment by erecting secrecy around a subject, national security being the utility excuse for everything the government doesn’t want people to know.

Add to this the concerted effort (plain enough to see if one bothers to look) to keep the population uneducated, without options and alternatives, scrambling just to get through the day/week/month (handily blocking information gathering), and thus trapped in a condition of low information. Such downward pressure (survival pressure, one might say when considering the burgeoning homeless population) is affecting a greater portion of the population than ever. The American Dream that energized and buoyed the lives of many generations of people (including immigrants) has morphed into the American Nightmare. Weirdly, the immigrant influx has not abated but rather intensified. However, I consider most of those folks (political, economic, and ecological) refugees, not immigrants.

So those are the options available to powers players, where knowledge is power: (1) withhold information, (2) if information can’t be withheld, then bury it as a proverbial needle in a haystack, and (3) render a large percentage of the public unable to process and evaluate information by keeping them undereducated. Oh, here’s another: (4) produce a mountain of mis- and disinformation that bewilders everyone. This last one is arguably the same as (2) except that the intent is propaganda or psyop. One could also argue that miseducating the public (e.g., various grievance studies blown into critical race theory now being taught throughout the educational system) is the same as undereducating. Again, intent matters. Turning someone’s head and radicalizing them with a highly specialized toolkit (mostly rhetorical) for destabilizing social relations is tantamount to making them completely deranged (if not merely bewildered).

These are elements of the ongoing epistemological crisis I’ve been observing for some time now, with the side effect of a quick descent into social madness being used to justify authoritarian (read: fascist) concentration of power and rollback of individual rights and freedoms. The trending term sensemaking also applies, referring to reality checks needed to keep oneself aligned with truth, which is not the same as consensus. Groups are forming up precisely for that purpose, centered on evidentiary rigor as well as skepticism toward the obvious disinformation issuing from government agencies and journalists who shape information according to rather transparent brazen agendas. I won’t point to any particular trusted source but instead recommend everyone do their best (no passivity!) to keep their wits about them and think for themselves. Not an easy task when the information environment is so thoroughly polluted — one might even say weaponized — that it requires special workarounds to navigate effectively.