Abandoning Reason

Trump is a mere symptom, not the actual problem. The problem is a hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals and intellectualism, the dismissal of art, literature, and science as impractical and even contemptible human pursuits.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

In the introduction I quote part of Wikipedia's anti-intellectualism article. Trump and other populists like him present themselves as champions of the common people and against political and academic elitism; they paint a picture of a false class divide by propagating the notion that intellectuals dominate political discourse and control higher education, rather than the capitalists. Any rational mind will immediately recognize that it is the moneyed interests who control and dominate political discourse, and see the devious trick of making use of the fact that there is indeed a large overlap between the two: the well educated are indeed the well off, generally speaking. This makes them the perfect vehicle by which to popularize the narratives in support of the status quo that serves the rich, but by no measure does this diminish the reality of the real class divide being between the insanely rich and the rest.

Look, it's simple: to stay in power in something resembling a democracy, the last thing you need is a well educated and well informed people. The neoliberal world order of globalized corporatism is the result of a concerted effort by all western democracies, headed by Washington, the head of the neoliberal snake that has the world in its suffocating grip. Part of their strategy is the misinforming and dumbing down of the people. From the very start of our most recent democratic experiment, it was made perfectly clear that the people can not be trusted with the decisions that influence the fate of the country. Of course it's not really the fate of the country, or its people, but rather the fate and status of the tiny upper class that made up those first governments; they've never been "by and for the people".

In his book Propaganda Edward Bernays opens with:

THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
_{source: Propaganda - 1928}

Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, saw the need to control what people think for the corporate class to hold on to power in a society that's becoming more and more democratic. After World War II the word "propaganda" was associated with Nazi Germany, so it was replaced with "public relations"; Bernays is seen as the father of the public relations industry. The selling of an ideology works much like the Jedi mind trick: it only works on feeble, weak minds. Ever wondered why the distinction between information and entertainment has become steadily weaker, to the point even that we now speak of "infotainment"? Or why we live in an age of "fake news" in which a lunatic president like Trump can rightfully and unashamedly point an accusing finger at the "fake media"?

In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are "lies straight from the pit of hell," where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can't name the vice president, it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.
_{source: Psychology Today}

_{How Trump Won (Thanks to Edward Bernays Propaganda)}

Well, there you have it. Maybe if average people knew that there's more genetic variation between different African tribes or peoples, than there is between Africans and white Europeans, there would be less fear- and ignorance based racism and xenophobia going around? Don't get me wrong; being well informed is no guarantee against bad judgement, as there are a lot of well educated racists in the world. Also there's no equivalence between being well informed and being smart, nor the opposite. It stands to reason though that seeing through the propaganda would prevent one from falling for the populist lies and fear-mongering. This requires that we see the communication from the corporate controlled government for what it is: propaganda aimed at keeping alive the neoliberal snake. The propaganda will work as intended, has worked as intended on minds, well educated and otherwise, like the Jedi mind trick; "these aren't the droids you're looking for..."

Americans have allowed their democracy to slip away, their culture overtaken by enormous corporations that effectively control both the governmental apparatus and the media, thus shaping life around materialism and consumption.
_{source: Psychology Today}

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society": words by Edward Bernays that ring true now more than ever. The capitalist powers that be, have droves of people convinced that "it's capitalism that has lifted countless people out of poverty": isn't it amazing how so many people can believe this without even questioning it? Even when all their experience tells them the opposite: it's the capitalist, corporate class that always opposes measures that lift people out of poverty. If your wages are raised, that's not out of your bosses generosity. Aminimum wage doesn't exist because the corporate class wished for it. When child labor was abolished, it was not because the factory owners wanted that so badly. When women got the right to vote, it was not because the sitting government wanted to give them that right. It's always, ALWAYS the fight AGAINST the capitalist class that raises people out of poverty, economical poverty as well as social poverty. The middle class exists only because of this fight against the capitalist class, it's not a creation of the capitalist class. Technological and scientific progress are responsible for the rest of it, and there's no causal link between capitalist incentives and this progress. Just because the age of capitalism coincided with an age of unprecedented technological progress doesn't mean that one caused the other. So, question everything your politicians and corporate media tells you and don't grant them the benefit of the doubt; it's much safer to assume that they tell us what they need us to believe.

This is why we live in the era of "post-truth", the Oxford Dictionary word of the year 2016, in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Charles Sykes explains it in the Ted Talk that's linked below: "Unfortunately, what we have learned is that lying works. It generates clicks, ratings, votes. Lying can in fact be a very profitable business model, but it is an existential threat to democracy." Without truth no democracy, without truth no freedom. He also says: "And one of the people that I've had a chance to meet in the course of my career was Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and Russian dissident, who makes an important point. He says look, the point of propaganda in an authoritarian regime is not just to mislead you and to push an agenda, it is to attack your critical sensibilities, to annihilate truth."

_{Navigating a Post-Truth World | Charles Sykes}

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