False Consciousness and the Sleeping Public

I was over at Shijuro’s earlier looking at some splendid examples of our loony legal system.  He expressed some hope the public might wake up to what’s really going on.  Hell hasn’t frozen over yet, I thought.

I’ve been struck for a long time that we mostly make decisions in ignorance.  Practical brain research shows this over and over.  We have the idea that the public only has to be shown the truth to accept it, but this is not the case.  Given all the evidence for evolution we still have droves of people who believe creationism – and one can demonstrate similar wuckfittery in many areas.  Even people who profess to believe in evolution generally can’t explain why very well and appear to have simply gone with the flow.  There is no evidence most people are any good at critical reasoning.

We vote on ‘the economy’ but know nothing of economics – the current plague of television punditry tells us this as the coverage is lightweight and haplessly inaccurate and unknowledgeable.  The rich have been robbing the rest of us blind and even this is not established.  The key problem we don’t grasp as a public is that people who take or are given power are the problem if we have no means to regulate and control them in some manageable way that doesn’t become a free-for-all.

In democracy we give up to the will of the people; yet this is clearly not true in any simple way.  I was part of no people willing the Iraq war.  I am part of no people willing the rich more and more money.  I sense no majority in favour of such either.  And just what is the will of the people if it’s based in superstition, prejudice and worse?  The problem we have is one of public accountability.  To understand this we need to see much more laid bare.

Many of the arguments on business, politics and economics do not proceed on the basis of fact.  We often justify the utterly ludicrous.  If we want an equal society, how do we justify wealth that makes society clearly unequal?  I have no more faith in democratic socialism than Hayek, but wealth fascism is no more acceptable than this Utopia.  Statements such as ‘the City being a competitive place where ludicrous salaries and bonuses are earned and have to be paid to attract the talent’ are evident rubbish, yet BBC bimbos bleat them out as true.

The public don’t know much, whether about the utterly sinister Nico Bento case or those Shijuro puts forward on what we might term ‘the other side’.  Examples from the wider world as just as bad.  The public offers us no hope.  It is  as incapable as the Bento jury that allowed what their eyes could see to be overcome by lying bullshit.

Advertisement