thedailybell | In other words, paranoia and conspiratorial cynicism need to be
damped for government to survive and perform its proper function.
Here:
Why, then, did a seasoned operator like Mr Comey, whose judiciousness was praised by the Clinton campaign through the summer, feel the need to divulge this half-baked and potentially insignificant development before assessing it? There is one answer: fear of the mob.
The director of the FBI – those tough guys who smash in doors and shoot people – was scared that if he didn’t talk now and the news leaked out, it would confirm every conspiracy theory going about how the agency was in the Clintons’ pocket. In other words, we’ve reached a point in the politics of the world’s most powerful democracy where the appearance of probity matters more than the reality.
This is a key point in the article. It is one that fully reveals the
cognitive dissonance at the heart of this particular argument. The idea
is that government is too delicate to sustain itself in the face of the
“mob.” The mob must therefore be silenced or “probity will matter more
than reality.”
But who is to determine what constitutes a “mob”? And who is determine that the mob’s “reality” is false?
Both the Sunstein article and now this one are erecting very specific
kinds of arguments. Government, we are told, is fragile and must be
protected from forces that will undermine its credibility.
But this conclusion is merely assumed. It is never proven.
This argument begins and ends with government. Yet the Internet and
its recovered history shows us clearly that Western governments
mostly provide concealment for the world’s real powers that prefer to
operate behind the scenes.
This is the reason for so much cynicism. Many have realized that the
society constructed around them is lie. They have reacted by distrusting
almost anything associated with modern society.
But in these articles, we can see the forces being marshaled against
this state of mind. The preferred antidote is simply to assert that
people’s distrust is corrosive to government authority and democracy
generally.
No logic bolsters this argument. That’s why it is an emergent elite meme.
The goal of an elite meme is to be convincing not truthful.
And if it is not convincing – and increasingly elite memes are not –
then its function is, anyway, to provide a justification for what we
call directed history. These are the authoritarian strategies that
elites wish to inflict on the rest of us.
This latter meme is an outgrowth of “populism versus globalism.”
Populists, as we’ve pointed out, are being cast as ignorant, violent and
intolerant. The current meme – let’s call it “conspiracy versus
government” – lumps in conspiracy with populism.
Populists, we learn, are apt to adopt an irrational distrust of
government. And what is government? It must comprise all that is good
and virtuous in an uncivil world.
Both populists and conspiracy theory are to be vanquished,
eventually, by wise globalists who understand that the absence of
government will lead to violent “anarchy.”
Would that it were true. It is not. Government is merely in this
day-and-age a curtain hiding the world’s real controllers who use
endless violence, monetary debasement and economic depression to
get their way.
Conclusion: We are watching the emergence of a new,
dangerous meme. Increasingly and forcefully, it is being argued
that “government” is good and that the truths people have discovered
about their lives and society are destabilizing to government, and
therefore “bad.” The idea will be to use these memes to make a case for
increased censorship and even, eventually, violent repression – and
worse.
