Cooked
If you do nothing else, watch this:
As noted here many years ago, it’s much cheaper to produce bullshit than the truth.
And we, in America, are ruled by the cheapest motherfuckers to ever step on third base.
He is a man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. – Jim Hightower, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, 1988, on George HW Bush, who begot George W Bush, who begot Donald J Trump (VIDEO)
We are in full blown devolution, as presaged by the artists and philosophers of the 1970s, when they looked around at their peers and saw the sons and daughters of World War survivors reject the hard won truths of mass hunger and mass violence, for personalized pap and circumstance.
Tell me what I want to hear.
As you may know from having put your hand on the stove, we are hard wired to avoid pain.
The truth hurts.
Life is inherently, unavoidably, a struggle.
The baby is born crying, ripped from its “cocoon”. The baby must be fed otherwise it will die. That food must be found, produced, fought over. The baby is, quite likely, food for another living being. Etc.
The founding myths of every society address this pain.
Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden of eden – a place without pain – when they dare… learn the truth. (LOL. It doesn’t get more obvious.)1
The truth – by which I mean facts, never mind wisdom – is a costly enterprise. (For example, you can establish whether or not a bullet to the head will kill you exactly once.)
Bullshit is cheap.
And thus lucrative.
clarification: a lie is when someone knows the truth and conveys the opposite. bullshit is when the speaker doesn't even know the truth. we are in the domain of the latter. cf. On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt, 2005, Princeton University Press (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691276786/on-bullshit)The answer is “yes.”
Advertising.
What happened was: post-WWII, we became a consumer society, which relies on advertising to stoke demand, which in turn became our dominant discourse.
In a society where advertising dictates what we see, hear, read, the truth seems extraneous.
Over and over again I find myself driving Mexicans to drink from sewage by using AI to convert the transcript of a YouTube video into a two paragraph summary.
(Do you have 20 minutes to spare? Lucky you!)
How the fuck did the World Wide Web, instantiated by a technology called hyperTEXT, degenerate into oral culture?2
Advertising.
The reason why VIDEO IS EVERYTHING AND EVERYWHERE IS VIDEO is that it’s more lucrative. Full stop.
Smarter people than me have laid out, in full detail, how the USA might retard its retardation, and get back on the path of progress. (e.g.,: dismantle the Supreme Court)
But I am certain the path forward requires a systematic dismantling of the propaganda mills we have accepted as our beacons.
The Pharmakon.
I am but a wretch who has spent the last 19 years in the service of the very thing that is killing what I love the most. But I do know my own pain. And, lately, I’ve probably had more than you.
A part of my pain, of late, has been picking my father up off the floor. Often in the middle of the night. Usually, the floor will need to be mopped or the bedding changed – washed, dried.
As I wrote on Mark Zuckerberg’s video advertising channel Instagram – and some of you confirmed – it is astounding to what extent we are encouraged to talk about babies and their needs but must never speak of the elderly. As if you can have one without the other.
But one unexpected pleasure (?) of this natural process is the laying out of pills. And the knowledge that much of our behavior – our reality – is a result of dosage.
Take too little, you end up sick. Take too much, you end up dead.
The same must be said of lying.
We need a certain amount of pain in our lives. A certain amount of friction. A certain amount of struggle.
Anything less and we become monsters.
Speech is never free.
When you make a statement that is untrue, you shift the burden onto the recipient. If you do so unwittingly, you should be corrected. If you do so wittingly, you should be punished.
The simplicity of this maxim will shock Americans.
We have grown so accustomed to licking the boots of our overlords that the possibility of lifting our heads to gaze upon the sun, directly, feels like revolt.3
If you watched the opening video, you’ll know that almost all the platforms used to disseminate this racist propaganda stripped out the metadata that easily, clearly labels this slop as such.
A free society would not allow that. Just as a free society would not allow the wealthy to shit into people’s mouths.
Freedom requires rules. Against bullying. Against lying. Against cheating. (Against gambling. But that’s for another day.)
“We are cooked,” the kids say. But it’s the adults who cooked them, like boiled frogs, through 40 years of deregulation.
What’s that? You don’t care for the Bible? You’re into more sophisticated shit? Then enjoy yourself a WESTERN CIVILIZATION MASTERPIECE: Oedipus Rex, where the titular protagonist (that’s you, dummy) literally gouges his eyes out when he learns the truth.
“Chat,” humanity is the same story, over and over and over again. The best we can do is be kind. That’s it. ↩
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Parole or écrit? I’m not playing that game. The words you are reading now may have a phonic equivalent but they are not, currently, making sounds in your head. Written language is its own thing and it is more efficient at transferring knowledge. (Is oral culture sophisticated and worth preserving? OFC!) ↩
ICE doesn’t need to create a Total Information Awareness agency. They just need to buy the data from the advertising industry.
The USA and China have pursued parallel paths to converge on the same illiberal outcome: a police state run by oligarchs.
We can do better. ↩