Do you believe your own senses?
In 1984 George Orwell said the ultimate aim of the Party is that you don’t believe your own eyes and ears. When this occurs, and it does all the time, we don’t tell ourselves that we no longer believe our own eyes. It is more like addiction: where is the person who can and will describe their own addiction? We always give ourselves a cover story. I remember a report from the spate of train bombings in Spain that a US student had witnessed a bombing from a safe distance and immediately went onto Google to find out what was happening.1
Addiction is the appropriate label. We are addicted to the foods we are sold, and we are addicted to the information we are sold. We are sold on what is thrust at us. We have a cover story about consumer choice and it is a lie that we tell ourselves. That is what addicts do. How many people can research and come to the obvious conclusion that all breakfast cereals are harmful to health? How many people can actually maintain critical thinking in the face of the mandated narratives?
There is coercion behind the addiction. How many people became addicted to cigarettes without being manipulated and pushed by a corporate initiative? How many people will tell you they don’t have time for a breakfast other than cereal, toast, or a croissant? Why does the report of their own eyes and history not count as evidence?
Critical thinking
Since Milgram, the estimates of how many people are capable of critical think remain stable at about 20%.2 We follow the dictates of power and authority. We do what the teacher says, we do what the doctor says, we do what the policeman says. Not many people challenge the doctor, and not many doctors make space for a challenging conversation. Not many doctors challenge their peers and the institutions they work in.
Many educational institutions claim to encourage critical thinking. When I was teaching in a university setting (Business for IT) I found it next to impossible to even get the idea of critical thinking on the students’ agenda. The notion of how critical thinking about the syllabus being studied might be an advantage personally is a big leap. I myself was floored during a viva for my degree by the question from the external examiner “what was wrong with the course?”.
David Graeber used to say that his job as an academic was to unpick the conformity engineered by the students’ previous education. During my college interview for a place, the rather august and fierce fellow interviewing me (a former All Black I believe), was bent on discovering my relationship with my academic father. Had I read any of his books? No. I think I may well have become more conformist after that.
The granddaughter of a colleague of mine was subjected to an interminable series of interviews to become a fast track civil servant. Faced with a panel of previous fast trackers she asked what big programmes they had cut their teeth on and then commented that if she had been on those programmes she would not want it known! That was the clincher.
Other thinkers
We can of course read the critical thinking of others. By its nature such reading will take us for a while outside the official narrative. We can’t borrow it of course, and it can be addictive in convincing us of our own critical powers.
If we are consistent in what we bring to our thinking — always positive, always kind, giving the benefit of the doubt — we are likely to be exploited and radically undermined.3 The competition for control of the narrative and incentives people are given to establish that control mean that there are real reasons to fear being seen as a critical thinker. The boot will be put in. In the extreme this is Navalny and now his widow.
It is not conspiracy to believe that powerful institutions and people want us the believe their lies and not to believe narratives that expose their hidden motives. The very notion of facts becomes contested and people in public life state barefaced lies repeatedly and even when corrected. People who care about truth say how worn down and exhausted they become just by paying attention to the barrage.
Even the motives that we might resist can be twisted and dark. It seems that the UK government is following a scorched earth policy of making it impossible for the government that replaces them to succeed. And I saw a prediction today that the US election this year would not happen, being overtaken by planned chaos.
The alternatives
If the Party in 1984 want us not to believe our eyes and ears, they will succeed in that just by grinding us down. Kafka’s contribution to this understanding is to rehearse the random illogicality of bureaucratic action, that doesn’t allow a logical response. When David Graeber was drummed out of the US, there were attempts to destabilise his mind by breaking into his flat and subtly moving things. There are also mafia thugs ready to threaten dissidents with common or garden personal violence. What remains is an attitude that I associate with religious persecution, where the truth of what I believe becomes ever more inescapable in the face of attempts to crush it.
What was contentious and unclear is clarified by repression. If governments and pharma companies will not acknowledge vaccine injuries, the injuries take on a greater significance. Why hide them? What are the options then? To join the consensus denial or to inquire further into evidence not destroyed by the people demanding consensus.
Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows proposed a hierarchy of places to intervene in a system. The top two for our purposes here are the goals of a system and ultimately the mindset within which a system runs. The usual frame for this “places to intervene” is a system in need to reform and some smart people working out how to enact the reform.
If we are thinking about our perception being obliterated by the Party, we have to understand that the places to intervene have already been used against us. We have to understand how the system has been manipulated to blind us to what is happening, to the evidence of our eyes and ears.
To do that we have to understand the actual goals of the system, in the sense of POSIWID. What is the consistent outcome of the system doing what it does, irrespective of what it is intended or “supposed” to do? That such an investigation is often branded as conspiracy theory only confirms its importance. For instance, if competition between firms results in prices going up, don’t believe that competition keeps prices down.
And having understood the goals of a system independently of the accompanying propaganda, then you need to see what the mindset is, and indeed how that mindset must change is the system is to be different. There are plenty of systems where governance acts to protect the interests of the people working in the system. We don’t hear much of them because he Party mindset is that such systems are “socialist” and therefore flawed and oppressive.
An example now 100 years old and still fresh as a daisy is the big car manufacturing companies in the US buying up public transport systems to close them down. They knew that people “really” wanted to own a car rather than use a tram. The goal was to make sure people needed a car and the mindset was that transport and the opportunity for conspicuous consumption should be at the aspirational heart of society.
It is never a question about whether public or private transport is “better”. That is just a smokescreen and a distraction. It is never about whether the risks of vaccinating or not vaccinating are greater: that debate can go on for ever and be manipulated for ever.
Pandemic?
We need to give these notions a serious road test. Always bear in mind this is not about true or false propositions, it is about being able to critically examine what “the Party” is saying. So, was there a pandemic and did the actions the pandemic narrative was used to justify make any sense?4
There was a “casedemic”. The number of cases identified by PCR testing swelled and caused enough fear for people to do things they otherwise would not have done. The PCR test according to its late inventor and world expert over many years cannot be used outside a laboratory setting and certainly not for public health. So, the signal in the testing was not a real or reliable signal.
The way the statistics were recorded with a gap between test and outcome data is guaranteed to give a casedemic without there being any underlying signal. The reporting of cases was done in such a way as to inflate fear of the pandemic.
The fear engendered was used to drive a vaccination programme. That programme made some companies and individuals extremely rich. The claims made about the vaccination programme by people prominent in public life and top politicians were never true: the ability of the programme to slow the spread of the pandemic was never even tested experimentally. The claims of efficacy were watered down and then largely abandoned.
There are widespread harms from the vaccine. On the medical side there was never any informed consent: what patients got turned out to be simple propaganda about safety and efficacy. But people who refused the vaccination (a very basic human right) were excluded from venues, activities and even their employment. The massive anxiety generated in people who were at very little risk, relatively and absolutely, needs a massive and humble apology.
Elites were largely exempted from being vaccinated, with that fact being concealed and camouflaged.
And the virus itself cannot be produced for inspection to validate the programme. What we are given is a computer artefact of what are claimed to be fragments of the virus. The actual activity of the virus: of infection and transmission is surmise.
The abrogation of human rights of many kinds is not remotely justified by what is actually known of the pandemic. Fatality rates are much less than 1%. Even the use of nasal swabbing should never occur in a medical setting. All the rules were thrown out in favour of draconian actions, but the underlying rationale was weak to non-existent.
This is precisely the scenario we are interested in. A mass hysteria around a narrative that achieves something for “the Party”. Critical thinking is dismissed as conspiracy theory even before it is articulated. A real and present danger, one that can be used to destroy you, us, anyone.
The longer view
George Orwell was writing about and for his own times. 1984 came and went. We treat his words as if they are still a prediction rather than something which is and was with us all along. Our blindness to this effect of mind control on our own selves is wilful blindness, something we secretly embrace. As ever we see others as subject to mind control more readily than we see ourselves.
The notion of integrity that this throws up runs against the drift to plagiarism and AI in general. Our eyes and ears and our ability to articulate what is real for us can be lost casually in a welter of seeming sophistication. How many people do we know who firmly speak their own truth, based on their own observations? We don’t even mourn that lack.
The violence is subtle. We may not even notice the loss of our own autonomy and authority. But the loss of self and agency as it develops is as deeply damaging and violent as anything we can imagine. A holocaust of what actually matters to ourselves and to the world.
Finally, we need to point out that the embodied “Party” are the shallowest, stupidest, most sociopathic people in our ambit.
1 One of my friends tells the story of a bullet-ridden car coming to a halt opposite his flat in Battersea, the remnant of a running gun battle which appeared in the press only as a ‘minor incident under investigation’ without any detail, despite one of his neighbours being a reporter/photographer directly on the scene.
2 Stanley Milgram of Yale who, in a series of experiments that probably wouldn’t get approved today, led ordinary people to behave in, um, shocking ways.
3 In game theory, any consistent posture can be exploited by an opponent. Think of poker, in which playing faithfully to the actual strength of one’s hand is a losing strategy.
4 You may have strong feelings and opinions about this topic, which is the point. If so, kindly treat it as a thought experiment and keep reading!
