Mainstream Green Narratives: It’s About Selling More Industrial Products
A follow-up to Contemplation LXXXIX that responded to the idea that if enough people found true contentment and happiness by cooperating with others, humanity would discover a ‘oneness’ that could ‘achieve truly coherent action’; all within the context of pursuing a ‘sustainable’ future. The individual that shared this notion added a link to a UK House of Lords publication as a follow-up, suggesting it demonstrates ‘an evolution of ideas’. The following is my response after reading the document.
Skimmed through the document. Here are a few clues as to why what is written will not and cannot work, and, in fact, will exacerbate our overshoot:
“…through adopting new technologies…[that] will bring…economic benefits.”
“… through technological innovations and their uptake…[by] making it easier…to adopt new technologies…”
“…focus [upon]…adopting ultra-low emission vehicles…low-carbon heating technologies…”
“…several positive trends such as…growing uptake of electric vehicles…”
“…stimulate investment and innovation…”
“…focus on the rollout of low-emission vehicles…”
“…new developments [of public transportation]…”
Then there’s the entire mythical narrative around ‘net zero’ and achieving it via non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies and their associated industrial products (when really it’s about dependence upon unproven technologies and manipulative accounting). And one way of achieving this is the ‘phasing out’ of fossil fuel-based products (conveniently leaving out the inconvenient facts that ‘green/clean’ energy products rely heavily upon fossil fuels both up and down their production, maintenance, and disposal/reclamation industrial processes).
While there is much, much more in the document, these examples point to the undeniable fact that much of what is being proposed relies upon the (mandated?) adoption of ‘green/clean’ industrial products, and the continuation of, for the most part, our status quo systems. They’re simply tweaked a bit to reduce our cognitive dissonance.
Much of the document relies upon marketing/propaganda to drive behavioural change, learning from what was achieved without much pushback during the pandemic. In fact, I get the sense that the document is a stepping stone (slippery slope?) towards what some analysts have predicted: widespread pandemic-type lockdowns in the guise of combatting climate change.
And I cannot help but interpret this as further confirmation of my growing belief that this is primarily (totally?) about narrative control and forced adoption of industrial products by those who own/control the industries and resources as they attempt to consolidate/maintain/enlarge their slice of an ever-shrinking economic pie as we increasingly bump up against the limits to growth on a finite planet. To say little about the blindness to the many layers of our predicament, especially when it comes to energy and other finite resources.
My ‘fear’ is that we will do almost exactly what is outlined here because rather than challenge or disrupt the status quo power and wealth structures of the globe’s ruling caste it actually enhances them; but, as demonstrated in this document, can be wrapped up in a veil of ‘green’ and marketed to the masses as another beneficent policy/action by the ruling class for the masses. Perhaps this image sums it up best:
After over a year, the House committee investigating researchers and their work on disinformation… has yet to produce tangible results. Public hearings have not yielded actionable evidence that the federal government has been weaponized… There have been no legal wins and no legislation has been passed.
Zadrozny in the same article said that “until recently,” people like Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Elon Musk and I have been “extraordinarily successful” in fighting what we call the “censorship machine,” adding, “in the past two years, government efforts to respond to disinformation have been shuttered.” Yet the same efforts, in the same time period, yielded “no tangible results.” This is NBC News. Who edits these people?
Regarding “no legal wins and no legislation”: as Jordan’s Committee noted Monday, the House passed “The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act” last year, and the Censorship Accountability Act recently passed in Committee. If you want to argue a bill not yet signed into law doesn’t count as “passed” legislation, fine, but “no legal wins”? The Murthy v. Missouri censorship lawsuit before the Supreme Court is there because four federal judges alreadyruled government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are likely in violation of the First Amendment.
Does NBC mean “no legal wins,” except the ones that sent the issue to the Supreme Court?
Intelligence asset Imran Ahmed’s seedy money comes to light, although his lawyers won’t explain his false filings with the IRS.
The dark money that apparently birthed the censorship industry’s most critical “anti-disinformation” group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), recently came to light in an investigation by The Telegraph, which uncovered £700,000 in undeclared donations to British Labour Party politico Morgan McSweeney. And who’s McSweeney? He helped found CCDH in the UK in 2018—the same timespan when millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen were sending McSweeney secret money, triggering an investigation by Britain’s Electoral Commission.
As I first reported last October, Imran Ahmed is a Labour Party political operative who maintains close ties to intelligence agencies and began running CCDH from D.C. in 2021, when he started working closely with the Biden administration. That first year in D.C., Ahmed took in 75% of his donations from a dark money pass through, although new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents show Ahmed provided false information to the U.S. federal government to receive tax-exempt, nonprofit status.
“A finding that there is a materially incorrect statement on an application for tax exempt status should hopefully encourage the IRS to take a hard look,” said Dean Zerbe, a tax attorney with consulting firm Alliant, and a former Senate staffer who investigated corruption in the nonprofit industry.
While he was based in the U.K., Imran Ahmed ran both the CCDH and another Labour Party front group, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), to attack British leftists, to defund the Canary news site, and to remove Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party’s leftist leader. Both CCDH and SFFN wielded wide influence in British politics and posed as grassroots movements, until reporters at the Canary exposed the groups’ ties to Labour Party conservatives Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser presents her repressive plan to “combat right-wing extremism” to the media.
The minders of public discourse have developed two arguments about why ordinary people should not be allowed to say what they think on the internet. These are that the ignorant rabble, conversing freely, may tend to express that subset of dangerous, prejudicial and deeply unauthorised opinions known as “hate”; and that they may consume unauthorised theories and narratives about present political events, known as “disinformation.” “Hate” and “disinformation” are amorphous concepts that can denote almost anything, but they have come to work in roughly complementary ways. “Hate” encompasses all the things our rulers would prefer you not say, while “disinformation” denotes all the stuff our rulers would prefer you not read.
We are dealing here with an ad hoc cultural system designed to suppress undesirable political ideas. Presumably, our leaders would prefer simply to ban these ideas, but their liberal commitments make overt repression of this nature awkward for them, and so they have jerry-rigged this dumb Rube Goldberg contraption instead.
Via the Google ngram viewer, we can gain some notion of where this system came from and when it was first assembled. Here are the frequencies of “hate speech” and “disinformation” in print publications between 1975 and 2019:
“Disinformation” began its career in the latter stages of the Cold War as a way to describe adversarial propaganda. When Russia, other Warsaw Pact countries or later Iraq attacked Western “fascism” or “imperialism,” that was “disinformation.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this usage persisted at somewhat lower fequencies. A lot of things were “disinformation” in these intervening years; superficial searching reveals uses like “corporate disinformation,” “tabloid disinformation,” “Republican disinformation,” and so on…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Government: Constantly Forsaking Our Ecological Systems to Chase the Perpetual Growth Chalice
Todays’ contemplation has been prompted by the usual shenanigans of government. In this case, the government of my home province of Ontario, Canada.
As regular readers of my posts are acutely aware, I have a strong belief that the primary guiding principle/motivation of our ruling caste is the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. Everything they touch is leveraged towards this goal.
Not surprisingly, the political elite within this caste always twist/market their actions/policies that serve to meet the above principle as a social service for the masses because regardless of their power/influence they continue to require the ‘support’ of the hoi polloi so as to avoid revolution/overthrow (they are, after all, hugely outnumbered and depend upon the non-elite for their labour and taxes). If the masses were ever to come to the realisation that our governments are, for all intents and purposes, little more than criminal organisations using their positions and power to funnel wealth from national ‘treasuries’ to their families and ‘friends’, and create legislation that strengthens this corruption, the reaction could be, well, who knows…history suggests it doesn’t end well for some of the elite.
As archaeologist Joseph Tainter points out in The Collapse of Complex Societies, the activities surrounding legitimising the status quo power/wealth structures is common in any society in order for the political system to survive. While coercion can ensure some compliance, it is a more costly approach than moral validity. States tend to focus on a symbolic and scared ‘centre’ (necessarily independent of its various territorial parts), which is why they always have an official religion, linking leadership to the supernatural (which helps unify different groups/regions). This need for such religious integration, however, recedes — although not the sense of the scared — once other avenues for retaining power exist. In modern nation states, this ‘sacred’ has become ‘government’; an organisational structure whose existence and necessity is rarely questioned.
It is for the reason of enhancing/maintaining government legitimacy that domestic populations are constantly exposed to persuasive narratives that paint its sociopolitical ‘leaders’ as beneficent servants of the people — thank you narrative control managers (especially the legacy media) for this. This recurring phenomenon rings true throughout time and regardless of the form of government.
Back to the target of this contemplation…
My provincial government has recently opened up a bit of a hornet’s nest around the expansion of housing upon significantly ecologically-sensitive lands of the Oak Ridges Moraine[1] that had been ‘protected’ from such exploitation since 2005 by a legislative act of our provincial parliament[2]. The narratives around the ‘protection’ of this area are interesting to peruse[3].
There has been a flurry of media articles and social media posts revealing the cronyism between the current government and certain landowners that stand to profit handsomely from this policy shift[4] — many of whom purchased the land in question in just the past few years. And while these revelations are interesting and serve to confirm my bias regarding the ruling caste, this is not what I wish to focus upon.
I want to talk a bit about the Overton Window[5] or ‘controlled opposition[6]’ that I have noticed in my province around this issue and the related notion of growth, especially population growth and its concomitant impact on the environment and ecological systems.
Virtually every article and citizen comment I’ve read around this issue responds in a relatively tightly closed worldview that assumes a few things, particularly that growth is not only beneficial but must and will occur. Since it is good and will continue, the ‘debate’ becomes one of urban sprawl verses densification.
It would be best, the argument goes, for the environment and ecological systems if we were avoid expanding into this ‘Greenbelt’ and to contain our growth within tightly-packed urban centres. This perspective is heralded far and wide but especially by so-called environmentally-minded groups/individuals.
For example, the Greenbelt Foundation — an “organization solely dedicated to ensuring the Greenbelt remains permanent, protected and prosperous” — argues that “Growing in more compact ways, relying more on intensifying existing urban areas and creating dense, mixed-use new communities can reduce long-term financial commitments and ensure better fiscal health now and for generations to come.”[7]
None realise that increasing density does not necessarily equate to environmental soundness since it is the numbers of people that leads to the most significant drawdown of finite resources, not necessarily how they are distributed — particularly in ‘advanced’ economies where consumption is significantly higher than other economies. Yes, small and walkable communities do tend to show a decrease in certain resource needs but one cannot keep packing more and more people into tight spaces and argue the environment and ecological systems are ‘saved’ in such a scenario.
The many cons of densification are ignored. Such as the ‘heat island effect’ that increases energy consumption, the increased economic activity and consumption that tends to accompany dense urban centres, and traffic congestion that can cause emissions increases — to say little about the social pathologies and negative health impacts found in higher density settlements, such as the increased prevalence of anxiety/depression or the speed with which epidemics can spread[8].
Nowhere does one read a challenge to the very foundation of this interpretive lens that growth is good and inevitable. Nowhere is a discussion of halting growth or, God forbid, reversing it (i.e., degrowth). Growth MUST continue, and this pertains to both economic and population growth.
Growth is of course a leverage point for our ruling caste. It is used, in my opinion, to continue to expand the wealth-generation and -extractions systems but also, and perhaps more importantly, to maintain the Ponzi-like nature of our financial/economic systems. It is, however, as are all policies/actions, marketed as the means to ensure our prosperity.
Here I am reminded of a passage from Donella Meadows’s text Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008):
“…a clear leverage point: growth. Not only population growth, but economic growth. Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don’t count the costs — among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction and so on — the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, very different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth. The world leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction. …leverage points frequently are not intuitive. Or if they are, we too often use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.”
The thinking outlined above by Meadows regarding negative growth and pushing in the wrong direction is completely foreign to the discussions I am witnessing on the expansion into Ontario’s ‘Greenbelt’. None dare challenge the mythical narrative that growth is good and inevitable. Such out-of-the-box thinking is not allowed. If such a thought is shared, the speaker is marginalised or ignored by most.
This is particularly so if one enters the kryptonite-like morass that is population growth in ‘advanced’ economies where such growth is ensured by skimming people from other countries — spun as a social service to the world’s needy — but is really about keeping the financial/economic Ponzi from collapsing because domestic populations are not reproducing fast enough[9].
And here I am reminded of another text passage, this time by Noam Chomsky in The Common Good (1998)[10]:
“In general, the mainstream media [everyone] all make certain basic assumptions, like the necessity of maintaining a welfare state for the rich. Within that framework, there’s some room for differences of opinion, and it’s entirely possible that the major media are toward the liberal end of that range. In fact, in a well-designed propaganda system, that’s exactly where they should be. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” ~Noam Chomsky
This appears to be the crux of the matter when it comes to many issues. The ruling caste, with the help of the mainstream media and others, circumscribe the range of the debate. This provides cover for the ultimate endgame — in the issue over the Greenbelt expansion it is the accommodation of population expansion through the construction of millions of homes (and it matters not whether these are on ecologically-sensitive lands or not in the long run) from which the ruling caste will undoubtedly make billions of dollars in profits…while the finite resources necessary to support this growth become more rare and costly to extract/process, and the environment and ecological systems upon which we depend continue to experience disruption and destruction.
We are continually fed a mythical narrative about growth and then set to debate and argue each other over how to accommodate it while ignoring the only way that might help to mitigate — at least marginally — our ecological overshoot predicament: degrowth.
Yet more propaganda and censorship, domestic and foreign
The Wrap-up Smear.
Although this Substack is about international news, I want to start with a five-year old old video of Nancy Pelosi describing a tactic used by democrats and the deep state to target and defame conservatives and people they deem unacceptable, like me. Have a listen. [go to article to view]
“You smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest and then you merchandise it and then you write it and they’ll say, see, it’s reported in the press that this, this, this and this, so they have that validation that the press reported the smear and then it’s called a wrap-up smear. Now I am going to merchandise the press’ report on the smear that we made. It’s a tactic, and its self evident.”
Representative Nancy Pelosi
This gambit is used a lot. This is what the deep staters used on the original signers of the Great Barrington Declaration. During the Covidcrisis and beyond, it has been utilized by the deep state to divide the sovereignty movement. Of particular interest and relevance is the number of “hit” pieces by conservative influencers to get the leaders of the movement. It you are playing into this gossip game, you are part of the problem. The deep state is using you by getting you to amplify messages that will divide people and organizations that the government doesn’t approve of.
This is a form of black propaganda being used against us by our own government.
As the Supreme court decides the fate of free speech in America today, never forget what we are up against.
Funnily enough, NATO actually has a 2020 report titled “Information Laundering in Germany”, which includes a graphic that describes the “wrap-up smear”.
Well, everyone wanted to do what they wanted to do instead of what they needed to do, and this is the end result. It was inevitable. Neglecting our responsibilities on this earth only had one outcome, and it’s a living nightmare. I think it’s time we talked about the time we all F-’d around, and ended up in Find Out-ville.
MOTHER NATURE IS PISSED
Look, we are definitely not on a winning streak right now. Mother Nature is pissed off, the weather and climate is all over the place, our food supplies are being disrupted in every way imaginable, and natural disasters are occurring left and right with no end in sight. And to top it off, people are struggling economically, emotionally, and psychologically. Don’t get me started on politicians, business leaders, and the 1%. Oh did I mention that everyone I know is in debt? But the reality is, I think we only have one to blame for our situation, ourselves. After all, we allowed it to happen, stood by and watched and went right along with it.
WE WERE WRONG
Personally, I think it all started with money and the inevitable greed that it brings to literally every society that has ever used it, but that’s another story. If you’re in the Daniel Quinn camp, it all started with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago when we transitioned from nomadic to sedentary and started taking more than we need (Ishmael had some good points on this). What ever the start, we are most definitely racing towards the finish like a fireball on cocaine. How the hell did we end up here? Well that is simple.
Decoupling Energy Use From Growth: More Bargaining
Today’s short piece is a comment I shared on an article by Nathan Surendran that highlights a debunking of the idea that energy can be decoupled from growth and thus reduce carbon emissions whilst supporting continued economic expansion. Nathan has a number of great articles to read on our energy conundrum and related topics; if you’re not familiar with his writing, I recommend it.
Great piece, Nathan.
I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that all such narratives (those that argue for the continuation of ‘growth’) are readily accepted by most since they are part and parcel of our denial/bargaining of the bio- and geo-physical limits of existence on a finite planet.
More ‘nefariously’ these stories are simply marketing/propaganda by the ruling caste and its sycophants to support their primary motivation: the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. Everything, and I mean everything, is leveraged to meet this overarching goal.
For example, the idea that a massive transition to ‘green/clean’ energy and related industrial products and processes — that are marketed as ‘net zero/carbon-free’ — can alter our climate trajectory completely overlooks the significant environmental/ecological damages that such a shift would entail.
That the ruling elite has created an Overton Window such that most people buy into this tale and cannot think outside the box created is not surprising. Carbon is our enemy and can be overcome via ‘carbon-free’ thinking and products; anyone who points out the flaws in this narrative are climate change deniers or shills for the fossil fuel energy.
Nowhere in the discussion is a realisation that the knock-on effects of the significant industrial processes that are involved or necessary to transition away from fossil fuels are problematic — in the extreme. Or, that land system changes[1] created because of our constant expansion are detrimental to our hydrological systems and thus creating the extreme weather events we are experiencing — perhaps even more so than ‘climate change’[2].
That land system changes are having a significant impact on our weather patterns cannot be considered at all since the idea that we need to stop altering the landscape of our world runs in a diametrically-opposed way from the expansion and growth of our human experiment. And this, of course, undermines the ruling caste’s power base. Better to leverage crises in a way that allows status quo power/wealth structures to be maintained and/or expanded, just as the idea of decoupling does.
The growth imperative must be maintained at all costs and perhaps as importantly the idea/belief that it can be must be adhered to by the significant majority of the population (or, at least, passively accepted) so that there is little to no rejection and thus counter-narratives to it.
For despite the seeming strength of the concept that infinite growth on a finite planet is entirely possible (because of technology and human ingenuity), if a tipping point of the populace comes to understand that our pursuit of growth is what has destroyed vast portions of our planet and other species leading us deeply into ecological overshoot — and subsequently rejects its pursuit — then the entire foundation of the ruling elite crumbles. And we can’t have that!
Better to double or triple down on the propaganda and censor/ostracise counter-narratives, thus allowing the game to go on just a bit longer…
This contemplation has been prompted by another great article by The Honest Sorcerer. If you’ve not read their work, I highly recommend it.
A couple of thoughts in reading your splendid piece (they always serve as a springboard for some reflection regarding my own thinking).
First, I have to wonder if the notion that most citizens in democratic societies have of ‘democracy’ (that they have agency via the ballot box) has ever truly existed. It seems to me that this idea has been perpetrated by the ruling caste of society in order to help legitimise their somewhat precarious positions of power so as to avoid mass protests and revolution. If people believe they have a say in how a society is organised and the policies it adopts, they are less likely to withdraw support or participate in resurrection. This widely believed narrative seems to me to be one of the most successful frauds/scams (along with the fiat currency monetary system) ever perpetrated upon the hoi polloi. It’s not that we’ve lost it; we never truly had it — it was simply more believable in the past for a variety of reasons (not least of which has been the increasing difficulty of keeping the fraudulent aspects and wealth siphoning hidden due to significant surplus energy and other resources that have served to mollify the masses — paying off one’s supporters with a small portion of the ill-gotten loot has its benefits).
Second, what you argue about the economic realm of our world (basically, that it is held together by magical thinking that denies bio- and geophysical reality, and ‘creative’ accounting) seems so self-evident but is so raggedly opposed by almost all (perhaps because none of us truly wants to look behind the curtain of the gargantuan Ponzi scheme we are all a part of). The ‘priesthood’ of economists that weave narratives to help society deny/ignore/rationalise away the barriers to perpetual growth upon a finite planet (and the negative consequences of such a pursuit) seems to hold a mesmerising sway upon the land. Their stories of growth/progress dominate almost all aspects of our lives, but especially the political realm — what politician doesn’t promise the glittering chalice of a constantly improving, prosperous, and growing society? Speaking truth to power about limits has little discernible benefit when on the campaign trail; better to promise endless improvement, especially when there’s no real accountability to such a false promise.
Given that we walking, talking apes are prolific story-tellers in our quest to share our understanding of this complex universe we exist within, I expect the narratives that aid our ruling elite in sustaining/maintaining their positions of power, prestige, and wealth to harden in the sense of increased vilification/censorship/ostracization (perhaps even criminalisation) of dissenting voices.
In addition, the human penchant for denial/anger/bargaining in the face of anxiety-provoking realities will lead to many (most?) rejecting the thesis that ‘collapse’ can or will befall us — even when it is too obvious to ignore. The stories told are already in desperate straits to counter the self-evident nature of our decline and the consequences of ecological overshoot and quickly dwindling resources. Counter narratives about the need for degrowth are slowly bubbling up to the surface of the mainstream/legacy media. Collapse (i.e., death of our global-industrial complex society), however, will be rejected by people because that is our nature — optimism bias is real and greatly impacts our thoughts about the future.
It’s difficult to go against the majority narrative that all is well and any perceived ‘crisis’ is the result of some evil ‘other(s)’; however, I am reminded of a recent meme that I saw: ‘Pessimists are optimists who have all the facts’. ‘Collapse’ cometh most assuredly but as has been argued: it’s difficult to make predictions, especially if they’re about the future.
Do you remember how the unconstitutional, pastel-authoritarian and totally batshit insane “Disinformation Governance Board” – with its Mary Poppins-cosplaying, Monty Python level of unintentional self-satirizing department head – was rolled out two years ago like a half-joke, half-beta-test of a version of the 1984 Ministry of Truth?
Well, kids, I wouldn’t really call this 4D chess or anything, but of course this was just bait. This parody and its rapid withdrawal reassures us that nothing of the sort could conceivably take place, while also seeding a visible, red-herring template for how we should expect heavy-handed, overt propaganda efforts to look in this day and age.
Meanwhile, there are currently massive efforts in the background and below the surface, all across the playing field, towards implementing big data and AI technology for not only the purposes of classical, increasingly obsolete propaganda or simple surveillance. No, this time, we’re exploring entirely novel methods of behavioural modification and narrative control intended to GET OUT AHEAD of the crystallization of discourses and even the formation of identities and worldviews.
They want to control the formation and reproduction of “social imaginaries”.
So the idea is to use massive data collection and AI pattern recognition to preemptively disrupt the formation of behaviourally significant narratives, discourses or patterns of information.
With these tools of “early diagnosis” of information that potentially could disrupt the power structure and its objectives, it then becomes possible to nip it in the bud incredibly early on, way before such information has even coalesced into something like coherent narratives or meaningful models for explanation or further (precarious) conclusions.
Today’s ‘contemplation’ is derived from a conversation on a Facebook Group post I was recently involved with[1]. I’ve been reluctant to write anything regarding the current Russian/Ukraine conflict due to the extreme polemic and emotional aspects such events create, especially in the early moments when people are reacting rather than reflecting[2], and the propaganda on all sides has been ramped up to warp speed. Nonetheless, here it is:
War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
So the Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong song goes[3], and this is especially true in times of overshoot given the drain on resources (which have for some time been encountering significant diminishing returns) that modern warfare entails. It is self-evident that military adventurism is heavily resource dependent, and a World War or even a significant increase in a ‘Cold War’ between geopolitical rivals will expedite the coming collapse of our global, industrialised societies as assuredly as a gargantuan ramping up of the industrial processes required to try and replace our fossil fuel-intensive energy needs with non-renewable, renewables[4] that many, even well-intentioned ‘environmentalists’, advocate for[5].
But depending upon one’s perspective, war can be quite good. In fact, fantastic. It is one of the longest lasting means throughout pre/history for a complex society’s ruling elite to maintain and expand power, gain access to resources, and with our current debt-/credit-based fiat currency monetary system and concentration of industrial/corporate ownership ensure gargantuan profits for a select few[6].
Many in the West have jumped upon the patriotic bandwagon to vilify Russian/Putin ‘aggression’ (conveniently ignoring/denying the ongoing aggression of their own elite over the years). This is not surprising given the slanted narratives they are provided by our politicians and their media mouthpieces on a regular basis to garner our support[7]. We are fed lies constantly through both omission and commission. Propaganda is everywhere, all the time[8].
There is a very good argument to be made (based upon history and context) that it has been the West’s ever-expanding encroachment towards Russian borders that has precipitated much of this[9]; to say little about the US-orchestrated coup[10] that led to the current West-leaning Ukrainian regime. And, quite naturally, there has been a full court press on to counter these arguments from US/NATO advocates[11]. The idea that it is unpatriotic to criticise or counter war ‘efforts’ is rampant. The ‘you are with us or against us’ mentality is everywhere. Of course it is nothing new to leverage our ‘natural’ tendency (what some refer to as tribal instincts) of patriotic feelings towards our nation state and her allies; it occurs both in and out of war time[12].
Is Russia innocent in any of this? Absolutely not; they are a nation-state based upon a ruling elite whose primary motivation is the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems to maintain their revenue streams and power/prestige like every other. The West’s elite (who are driven by the same motivation) have challenged the East’s elite and many innocents (the vast majority of the rest of us) are caught in the middle of this power play.
These people don’t give a shit about you or me except in terms of extracting labour and wealth to support them. But on some level they also need our consent to participate in such actions given how significantly outnumbered they are. This consent is, for the most part, manufactured by leveraging our fear of the ‘other’ and our sense of ‘patriotism’ — in this vein, we are sold all sorts of emotional narratives about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’, ‘duty’, ‘evil’, ‘tyranny’, etc..
It’s all bullshit but because of our tendency to defer to authority[13] and to identify with the elite we imagine it is ‘us’, the ‘average person’, that the ‘other’ hates and wants to fight[14]. We end up standing with our elite ruling class and support/cheerlead their pillaging of the nation’s treasury (both ‘wealth’ and natural resources) to engage in war…while it is them who are profiting given they own the industries and financial institutions that have to provide the ‘loans’ and armaments. It’s all based on lies and manipulation. It is a racket, plain and simple, just as US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler argued[15].
In the meantime, it pushes us further into overshoot through its significant resource drawdowns and sink overloading — to say little about the environmental impacts should this go nuclear.
The best thing the vast, vast majority of us could do is not choose a ‘side’ but walk away from this insanity by not supporting it at all. Refuse to participate. Refuse to repeat their propaganda. Refuse their lies and manipulation. Don’t be a pawn in their game. Reduce drastically your consumption. Reduce your dependency upon long-distance supply chains. Relocalise as much as possible. Build your community’s self-sufficiency and -resiliency. Grow your own food. Trade with your neighbours. Support each other, not the ruling class whose interests and motivations have nothing to do with you, your family, or your local community (unless of course its sitting on natural resources they want).
Refuse to remain in the Matrix as much as possible.
[2] Not that discussing cornucopian techno-fixes to our dependency upon fossil fuels with some is not — it can be very contentious, especially when one is attacked for being a fossil fuel shill/cheerleader for simply highlighting the problems that arise with alternative energy sources to fossil fuels.
[3] Although originally sung by The Temptations in 1969 and then rerecorded in 1970 featuring Edwin Starr, I personally was introduced to the song during my formative years of the 1980s and know it as a Frankie Goes to Hollywood one.
[4] Non-renewable, renewables is a term I have seen increasingly used by people to describe more accurately our energy harnessing technologies of solar photovoltaic, wind, and wave energy. The natural sources we are attempting to harness energy from are, for all intents and purposes, ‘renewable’ but the technologies used to harness and convert this energy to something humanity can use are not given their reliance upon finite resources, particularly the fossil fuel platform but also the many earth-based minerals that go into the components.
[5] From mining to mineral processing to transportation to reclamation and/or waste disposal, these complex energy-harvesting technologies require much in the way of finite resources and energy inputs, and add significantly to the overloading of our planetary sinks.
So, my trial for thoughtcrimes in New Normal Germany takes place next Tuesday, January 23rd. It will likely be a one-day affair. It’s open to the public, so, if you’re in Berlin, you can come and watch at the Berlin District Court, Turmstraße 91, Room 371. The proceedings are scheduled to begin at 12:00 noon.
Yes, that’s right, the German authorities are actually putting me on trial for my thoughtcrimes. I stand accused of criminal tweeting because I mocked the New Normal German authorities and pointed out one of their many lies. Here are the two thoughtcrime Tweets at issue.
The one on the left reads, “The masks are ideological-conformity symbols. That is all they are. That is all they have ever been. Stop acting like they have ever been anything else, or get used to wearing them.” The one on the right is a quote by Karl Lauterbach, who, believe it or not, is still the Health Minister of Germany. It reads “The masks always send out a signal.”
Let me back up a bit, and tell you the whole story.
What happened is, I tweeted those two Tweets, and they came to the attention of the Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter (“Hessen 3C”), a department of another department of the Interior Ministry of the Federal State of Hesse. The Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter then reported my Tweets to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), which launched a criminal investigation of me.
The Importance of Truth Speech. The parallel Rise of Propaganda-dependent Elites and Lonely Masses, and need for a new type of politician.
In my opinion, one of the more important speeches provided at the recent Fourth International COVID/Crisis Summit, held last November 2023 in Bucharest Romania, was delivered by my friend and colleague Dr. Mattias Desmet. Many but perhaps not all readers of this substack will be familiar with his groundbreaking synthesis published under the title “Psychology of Totalitarianism”. Others may recall my discussing Mattias’ theories and insights on various podcasts and with Mr. Joe Rogan, and the subsequent censorship response by Google and others when the terms “Mass Formation” and “Mass Formation Psychosis” were suddenly and explosively trending.
Dr. Desmet, Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone and I have spent many hours together since then, in our home, in his home, in Spain shooting the “Headwinds” films which were broadcast by the Epoch Times, visiting mutual friends, and in conferences such as ICS IV. I worked hard to make it possible for him to attend that meeting while maintaining his teaching schedule. He writes to me that there has been a concerted effort to convince him that I am “controlled opposition”, and to convince that he should disassociate from me. But, unfortunately for the propagandists and chaos agents, that is unlikely to happen as we have spent these many hours building a collaborative friendship and have been through thick and thin together. I steadfastly supported him through the academic attacks he has had, helped him build his substack following, and defended him when the Breggins maliciously attacked and defamed him.
These many concerted censorship and defamation attacks have taken a toll on him, as they have on me, but we both remain standing and continue our efforts to discern truth through the fog of the psychological war, the fifth generation warfare, which swirls around us.
The structures built to counter online activity of groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS were turned inward against the domestic population.
Documents recently provided by a whistleblower reveal offensive tactics used by government and outside organizations to counter and preempt the spreading of undesirable information, said independent journalist Matt Taibbi.
Mr. Taibbi and journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag recently exposed a new set of documents from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), an “anti-disinformation” group that waged an aggressive information operation on the public.
The new documents, dubbed the “CTI files,” analyzed tactics used against foreign terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, that can now be applied domestically to prevent unwanted information from being published, Mr. Taibbi said in an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
The CTI files referred to these tactics with the military term “left of boom action” and justified their usage by the danger posed by somebody like former President Donald Trump, the journalist said.
Mr. Taibbi previously investigated and disclosed some of the “Twitter Files” after tech billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 and allowed Mr. Taibbi and other designated journalists to query the company’s internal files.
The Twitter Files show how Twitter, a major social media platform for political speech, had been intertwined with the censorship industrial complex to suppress or remove under government pressure content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The government censorship apparatus partnering with academia, nongovernmental organizations, and private research institutions is often called the “censorship industrial complex.”Preemptive Tactics
CTIL was supposed to be a volunteer organization with a goal to identify misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Taibbi said, but “in reality, you got under the hood—they were interested in basically any topic.”
One of the areas of interest for me as I weaved my way through my ten years of formal post-secondary education (yes, I spent the entire decade of the 1980s pursuing four degrees at several different universities; some of it part-time as I waffled between education and full-time work for relatively good pay in a grocery store) was that of epistemology (the nature and origins of ‘knowledge’). It was likely the result of some of my required readings: Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Clifford Gertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures. Regardless, I ended up exploring (outside of my regular classes) such topics as deconstructive criticism, hermeneutics, and philology; interesting topics for someone who ended up teaching elementary school students (10 years) and as a school administrator (15 years).
Upon reflection, this exploration of how humans come to ‘know’ what they know (or at least what they believe) has led me to be rather skeptical of dominant narratives, especially of ‘authority figures’. My challenging of ‘authority’, as it were, may have come somewhat ‘naturally’ given I grew up in the household of a police officer. Not that I consider my dad to have been ‘authoritarian’, not at all, but the somewhat ‘natural’ pushback children can give to parents was slightly coloured in our household by the simple fact that my dad was a sociocultural authority figure on top of his role as a father.
Anyways, I believe I have always questioned to a certain extent the ‘popular’ stories we are exposed to. And as I’ve read more widely over the years, I’ve come to hold that these stories tend to always play to the pursuits of the people that dominate society’s economic and power structures. Reading Edward Bernays’ Propaganda, Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State, and Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance has certainly solidified that feeling. In fact, I’ve come to believe that the primary motivation of our ruling elite is the control/expansion of the wealth-generating/extraction systems that provide their revenue streams. Everything they do serves this purpose in one way or another. Everything.
As Chomsky makes clear in Hegemony or Survival, one of the dominant concerns of the ruling elite is controlling the masses. Without such control, their power and privilege is at risk since the masses far, far outnumber the elite.
Rothbard argues in Anatomy of the State even just simple, passive resignation by the people that the status quo structures are inevitable is enough to sustain them. To ensure such acceptance, the State employs ‘opinion molders’ to justify/rationalise/persuade the population of the beneficence of the ruling elite and that some alternative is far worse.
In Propaganda, Bernays sets out arguing that democracies being so complex require an unseen group of people to guide their ideas and beliefs so as to ensure cooperation. It is this special cadre that directs what stories/narratives are to be believed that is the real ruling power in a society, not its politicians. And, of course, Bernays became an important part of the US Empire’s storytelling to market geopolitical ‘interventions’ as adventures in nation building and spreading democracy.
So, narrative control is essential to maintaining power and privilege. One of the growing ways of controlling the narrative in a world of social media and non-mainstream/corporate digital news is to ‘disprove’ alternative stories. One of the more recent forms of such control has been the phenomenon of ‘fact checking’. Fact checking has been marketed as a form of objective and investigative research into claims disseminated by others. If one can ‘check’ the ‘facts’ and show them to be biased, prejudiced, misinformed, misguided, purposely false, etc., then one’s own narrative can be shown to be ‘true’ and ‘factual’.
It would appear, however, that the ‘fact-checking’ narrative itself is beginning to fray quite openly, perhaps reinforcing the accusation by some that the process of ‘fact checking’ is far more about giving the appearance of objective support for dominant/mainstream storylines (virtually always in favour of the power and economic structures that favour the ruling elite) rather than actually providing ‘factual’ buttressing of well-documented and evidentiary arguments.
Although you will have some difficulty finding the following stories in most (all?) mainstream/corporate media outlets (this is one of the ways legacy media censures stories; they simply don’t report on them at all or very marginally— see the organisation Project Censored for ongoing examples), there is increasing exposure that ‘fact checking’ is nothing more than another tool in the toolbox of narrative control/propaganda used by the ruling elite.
In a lawsuit by journalist John Stossel, Facebook has defended its ‘fact checking’ by claiming that the third-party fact checkers it uses are merely the ‘opinion’ of the fact checkers it depends upon and thus protected under the U.S.’s First Amendment. It’s ‘opinion’ not actually ‘factual’ so the lawsuit is frivolous.
In another accusation of wrong-doing, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has written an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta calling the censorship and flagging of some of their work very problematic. In fact, the editors of the journal called Facebook’s fact checking: “inaccurate, incompetent, and irresponsible.” Facebook/Meta has yet to reply.
We have a long-time journalist standing up to the fact-checking process and Facebook defending itself by stating these ‘fact checks’ are really just the opinion of others. Followed by a well-respected medical journal challenging Facebook’s fact checking as completely off-base and unfounded. Two pretty strong strikes against a powerful media’s supposed objective ‘fact checking’ and increasing censorship of non-mainstream stories.
I could go one with example after example of such blatant manipulation of narratives by our ruling elite and their so-called ‘fact checkers’ but what else is there to say? Except, if the mainstream/corporate media and/or government/politicians are pushing repeatedly a narrative (or purposely censoring one), then it likely serves the purpose of manipulating what you believe so as to maintain/expand the status quo power and/or economic structures of our society. Their stories, no matter the rationalisation/justification for them, should always be viewed critically and questioned. Chances are they are serving their narrow purposes, not the wider society’s.
I see this all the time in many of the energy/resource stories I read and the domineering economic paradigm through which the ‘facts’ are viewed at the expense of an ecological lens. And while there has been a growing incorporation of environmental/ecological concerns in the energy/resource narratives, it seems to me it’s more about crafting storylines that serve to leverage concern about natural limits to further expand wealth and control, and certainly not to address the notion that we can’t continue to pursue growth in any form in perpetuity without doing irreparable damage to the natural systems we depend upon for our very survival.
No, we can chase growth, employ everyone, and forever raise our standards of living by constructing ‘Net Zero’ buildings and electric vehicles, all powered by ‘clean/green’ energy, and living happily ever after. Comforting stories to be sure, but also ones that feed the insatiable profit-seeking of the ruling elite at the expense of the natural systems that provide our ability to be alive.
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong?
