{"id":66334,"date":"2023-12-05T10:21:40","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T15:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66334"},"modified":"2023-12-05T10:21:40","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T15:21:40","slug":"todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-xxxvi-on-narrative-control-and-fact-checking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66334","title":{"rendered":"Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh\u00a0XXXVI–On Narrative Control and \u2018Fact Checking\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh\u00a0XXXVI<\/h3>\n

December 21, 2021<\/p>\n

Tulum, Mexico (1986) Photo by\u00a0author<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Narrative Control and \u2018Fact Checking\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2018knowledge\u2019). It was likely the result of some of my required readings: Stephen Jay Gould\u2019s Ever Since Darwin, Thomas Kuhn\u2019s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Clifford Gertz\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

Upon reflection, this exploration of how humans come to \u2018know\u2019 what they know (or at least what they believe) has led me to be rather skeptical of dominant narratives, especially of \u2018authority figures\u2019. My challenging of \u2018authority\u2019, as it were, may have come somewhat \u2018naturally\u2019 given I grew up in the household of a police officer. Not that I consider my dad to have been \u2018authoritarian\u2019, not at all, but the somewhat \u2018natural\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Anyways, I believe I have always questioned to a certain extent the \u2018popular\u2019 stories we are exposed to. And as I\u2019ve read more widely over the years, I\u2019ve come to hold that these stories tend to always play to the pursuits of the people that dominate society\u2019s economic and power structures. Reading Edward Bernays\u2019 Propaganda, Murray Rothbard\u2019s Anatomy of the State, and Noam Chomsky\u2019s Hegemony or Survival: America\u2019s Quest for Global Dominance has certainly solidified that feeling. In fact, I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018opinion molders\u2019 to justify\/rationalise\/persuade the population of the beneficence of the ruling elite and that some alternative is far worse.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s storytelling to market geopolitical \u2018interventions\u2019 as adventures in nation building and spreading democracy.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018disprove\u2019 alternative stories. One of the more recent forms of such control has been the phenomenon of \u2018fact checking\u2019. Fact checking has been marketed as a form of objective and investigative research into claims disseminated by others. If one can \u2018check\u2019 the \u2018facts\u2019 and show them to be biased, prejudiced, misinformed, misguided, purposely false, etc., then one\u2019s own narrative can be shown to be \u2018true\u2019 and \u2018factual\u2019.<\/p>\n

It would appear, however, that the \u2018fact-checking\u2019 narrative itself is beginning to fray quite openly, perhaps reinforcing the accusation by some that the process of \u2018fact checking\u2019 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 \u2018factual\u2019 buttressing of well-documented and evidentiary arguments.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t report on them at all or very marginally\u2014 see the organisation Project Censored for ongoing examples), there is increasing exposure that \u2018fact checking\u2019 is nothing more than another tool in the toolbox of narrative control\/propaganda used by the ruling elite.<\/p>\n

In a lawsuit by journalist John Stossel, Facebook has defended its \u2018fact checking\u2019 by claiming that the third-party fact checkers it uses are merely the \u2018opinion\u2019 of the fact checkers it depends upon and thus protected under the U.S.\u2019s First Amendment. It\u2019s \u2018opinion\u2019 not actually \u2018factual\u2019 so the lawsuit is frivolous.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s fact checking: \u201cinaccurate, incompetent, and irresponsible.\u201d Facebook\/Meta has yet to reply.<\/p>\n

We have a long-time journalist standing up to the fact-checking process and Facebook defending itself by stating these \u2018fact checks\u2019 are really just the opinion of others. Followed by a well-respected medical journal challenging Facebook\u2019s fact checking as completely off-base and unfounded. Two pretty strong strikes against a powerful media\u2019s supposed objective \u2018fact checking\u2019 and increasing censorship of non-mainstream stories.<\/p>\n

I could go one with example after example of such blatant manipulation of narratives by our ruling elite and their so-called \u2018fact checkers\u2019 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

I see this all the time in many of the energy\/resource stories I read and the domineering economic paradigm through which the \u2018facts\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019t continue to pursue growth in any form in perpetuity without doing irreparable damage to the natural systems we depend upon for our very survival.<\/p>\n

No, we can chase growth, employ everyone, and forever raise our standards of living by constructing \u2018Net Zero\u2019 buildings and electric vehicles, all powered by \u2018clean\/green\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Project Censored<\/a><\/p>\n

Facebook admits the truth: ‘Fact checks’ are really just (lefty) opinion<\/strong>
\nFacebook finally admitted the truth: The “fact checks” that social media use to police what Americans read and watch\u2026<\/em>nypost.com<\/a><\/div>\n
Open letter from The BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg<\/strong>
\nDear Mark Zuckerberg, We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most\u2026<\/em>www.bmj.com<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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Today\u2019s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh\u00a0XXXVI December 21, 2021 Tulum, Mexico (1986) Photo by\u00a0author On Narrative Control and \u2018Fact Checking\u2019 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; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,5,6,7],"tags":[120,150,30371,14851,545,14545,26071,1880,655,5833,30370,33947],"class_list":["post-66334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","category-survival-2","tag-censorship","tag-collapse","tag-collapse-cometh","tag-fact-checking","tag-murray-rothbard","tag-narrative-control","tag-narrative-management","tag-noam-chomsky","tag-propaganda","tag-steve-bull","tag-todays-contemplation","tag-todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66335,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66334\/revisions\/66335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}