To continue from yesterday, one of the things we learn from the fifty years after the Sullivan ruling was that the truth, indeed, is what will set you free. So the Bible said, and it still is news. And, as it turns out, lies permitted will enslave you. We have run the free absolutist free speech experiment for the past half-century, the results are in, they resulted in Mitch McConnell taking over the Senate and the Republican-fascist regime in the House, a weak, flaccid neo-liberal in the White House who de-powered himself by trying to appeal to Republicans and the Supreme Court under the most corrupt and baldly political control in modern times, now headed by the free speech champion, John Roberts.
Yet the left believes "more speech" of the kind that got us here is what's needed to defeat the lies even as the proof that is a lie is, itself, conclusive. A lie as told by the media and the scribbling class which benefit from that permission. The proof of what their theory of speech results in is embodied in our government fifty years after they made the free lie the law.
You have to wonder what the Supreme Court justices who issued the Sullivan Ruling thought their permission of lies was going to mean for democracy, if they even considered such a trifle as, you know, The Peoples' right to information accurate enough to ensure the possibility of electing a government which would, then, do the will of The People.
The Jeffersonian rationalists, especially the anti-mystical, sciency kind, have a remarkable superstition as to the properties of speech. Their belief that the truth will magically win over even the most heavily financed and promoted lie, repeated over and over again over mass media, is sheerest nonsense. It is magical thinking to pretend that the truth has some automatic potency that a well crafted lie does not have. Lies crafted to deceive using some of the more basic and common weaknesses of human personality , lies enabled by the practical inability and disinclination to to fact check. Truth is often unpleasant, which automatically disadvantages its acceptance as compared to a pleasantly believed-in lie. A liar can construct any number of attractive lies and fantasies, someone who tells the truth is restricted to what is real.
Perhaps the brilliant jurists who adopted that magical thought had it in the back of their mind that we all have a staff of law clerks to do fact checking that or something. Or maybe they believed the academics and journalists who sold them that bilge. Or maybe they went into this knowing the results would be the enablement of the richest of the liars. Or perhaps they were simply naive, an excuse that the sitting Supreme Court Justices have no reason to have after seeing the results of that theory of speech in today's media environment, nothing like that of the late 18th century.
Experience and even the literary record disproves the "more speech" theory beyond any rational doubt. It is such nonsense that its refutation is current even as the superstition it refutes runs in parallel to it. Twain's remark about a lie going half-way round the world before the truth puts its boots on is often repeated but never, in my experience, in regard to the permit the media was given to lie by that decision.
The assertion that you can have legally permitted lies in the mass media and also democracy is a lie. As is the pretense of justices and judges that the legal system they administer is incompetent to sift the lies from the truth. We know that it is a lie they knowingly tell even as they assert it because THAT IS THE BASIC BUSINESS THEIR COURTS ARE ALLEGED TO BE IN, THEY SHOULD TURN IN THEIR ROBES OR STOP BEING SUCH BALD-FACED TWO FACED LIARS ON THAT COUNT RIGHT NOW. If they don't want the burden of telling their college chums and social set that they are lying and to stop it, they should quit so we can replace them with people who value the truth and understand that the truth is the oxygen of democracy, the permission of lies, carbon monoxide that will suffocate it even as it breathes.
I used to consider it ironic how such rulings as the Sullivan Ruling, Buckley vs. Valeo were supported by the ACLU and the "liberal media" as there was every reason to believe that lies and the permission of the rich to duplicate and amplify the lies that favored them in the media, would actually end up destroying the possibility of democracy but I don't consider that ironic, anymore. With a half century of testing their stated theory and its continued assertion I have come to believe that the very people who continue to push the idea must intend the results it has brought and will continue to bring. "More speech" was spoken, it wasn't heard because "Even more lies as payed for per second" won.
The quaint notion that it is wrong to lie, that it is a sin which will lead to evil consequences was one of those things given up as the intelligentsia adopted the pose of being scientific. When the intelligentsia actually were rationalizing their desires with alleged science and hard-cold logic instead of having those inhibited by something so unfashionable and inconvenient as traditional religious morality. That began a lot earlier than this, with the generation of Holmes, at least. Pointing out they were lying even as they asserted what they did is forbidden. Not by law but by the conventions of polite society, the educated class and the pantomime of liberalism we liberals are supposed to abide by. I'm not lying about it anymore.
The last post I did in this series was dark but it's nothing compared to what's starting today, in real life instead of in a blog post. But wallowing in gloom and doom, while having the comfort of involving no work or effort, is also among the biggest reasons the left lost. More about that, tomorrow.
I am less and less impressed with "systems of thought," or even ideologies, because they are used as either a mechanism of salvation ("O machine, O machine!") which will save us from ourselves with little effort on our part, or they are methods of obfuscation while we the people are looted and abused and discarded in favor of money and material gain.
ReplyDeleteAnd what does it profit to gain the world and lose one's soul? Funny nobody asks that question much, either. (Just saw Valerie Tarico's article on torture at Salon; it's even stupider than you said it was. But has she ever pondered the implications of that question? Not in print, so far as I can tell. She does make much of the use of the word "torture" in one parable from Matthew, without ever once considering the original Greek or the problems of translation. But then, what do you expect?)
So we turn to systems and ideologies and philosophies and even theologies, thinking that if we just tinker with them enough, all will be well. And so more speech will drive out bad speech (even though Plato put paid to that nonsense some time ago. There was a reason the Attic Greeks despised the sophistry of rhetoricians, and that Rome raised rhetoric to a high art. Rome never practiced Athenian democracy, for one thing; and we know the Constitution gave us a government based on Rome, not Athens.). Ideas don't matter; things don't matter; people matter.
But people are messy, and are not-me, and are so damned complicated! Ideas we can control, we can define, we can argue over. People can only be discerned in gossip (bad), or in a justice system (clumsy and blunt) or in love/hate (the either/or). No wonder we want a system of ideas to save us from ourselves.
O machine! O machine!
And look around the internet, which was supposed to bring democracy to the world and save us from the elites and prove the wisdom of the crowd and...God help us! Which is worse? The tabloid blather of webloids, or the mindless nonsense of the comments they attract? I have yet to find a major website (as opposed to small blogs like yours or NTodds) that don't attract the most idiotic commentary. Even Crooked Timber was full of academics blathering on like ignorant teenagers, especially on topics about which they knew nothing (which always makes one an expert!).
Our salvation lies not in what we think or think we can figure out. Indeed,most commentary on the web rejects wisdom altogether in favor of reinventing the wheel and rediscovering fire. Standing on the shoulders of giants we think we have climbed the last and tallest mountains, or even that we alone of all humanity were born at the mountain's summit. The favored position today is to destroy everything in favor of something somebody just thought of yesterday, or better still in order to pursue some outrage someone just discovered this morning which tainted the pleasure of their breakfast coffee and which proves they are more sensitive and compassionate at their keyboard and in their first world comfort and privilege than thou are, so stand away from them, for they are holier.
And humility is for suckers, and compassion is still reserved for those who have earned it, and is best dispensed from afar, and in posts on the internet; because real people are so damned messy, and even close family is too much to put up with because they just don't "get it" (If I see one more article at Salon about how much trouble it is to put up with family who don't think precisely as the author does, I'll go mad. These people really do think he universe is contained in their navel. I've met three year olds who were less self-centered.).