Reason's aversion to contingency is very strong

MY NOTING THE FAILURE OF "ENLIGHTENMENT" THINKING in riffing off of Hannah Arendt's great essay Lying in Politics is absolutely justified not only by her text, it is supported by another brilliant critic of the technocratic ideology of the time who cited exactly this essay, and who I will get to in a minute.  

Continuing on after what she said about advertising and the dishonest habits it instills, she said:

The second variety of lying, though less frequent in everyday life, plays a more important role in the Pentagon Papers.  It also appeals to much better men, to those, for example, who are likely to be found in the higher ranks of the civilian services.  They are, as Neil Sheehan's felicitous phrase, professional "problem solvers,"  and they were drawn into government from the universities and the the various think tanks, some of them equipped with game theories and systems analyses, and prepared, as they thought, to solve all of the "problems" of foreign policy.  A number of the authors of the McNamara study belong to this group and it is to them, after all, that we owe this truthful though of course not complete story of what happened inside the machinery of government. [The basis of the Pentagon Papers.]

The problem-solvers have been characterized as men of great self-confidence, who "seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail," and they worked together with the military of whom "the history remarks that they were 'men accustomed to winning.'"  We should not forget that we owe it to the problem-solvers' effort at impartial self-examination, rare among such people, that the actors' attempts at hiding their role behind a screen of self-protective secrecy (at least until they have completed their memoirs - which in our century have become the most deceitful genre of literature) were frustrated.  The basic integrity of those who wrote the report is beyond doubt;  whether he knew them or not, they could indeed be trusted by Mr. McNamara to produce an "encyclopedic and objective" report.

I will break in to point out that Arendt's characterization of the modern memoir, already true in her day has become such a flagrant and profitable practice that it is typical of those who witness the most serious of wrongdoing which they don't report but save up for their memoirs and "journalists" who will save stuff that a real reporter should be expected to report in a timely manner, so as to have it figure in the ending of wrongdoing instead of the profitability of the reporters' eventual book deal. I think we would all be better served if a ban on such book deals and a requirement for the timely reporting of crimes in office were a routine part of the hiring of all government workers.  The class of nest-featherers who save it for their book don't seem to make especially good public servants.

But these moral qualities that deserve admiration, clearly did not prevent some of them from participating for many years in the game of deceptions and falsehoods.  Confident "of place, of education and accomplishment,"  they lied perhaps out of mistaken patriotism.  But the point is that they lied not so much for their country, certainly not for their country's survival, which was never at stake, as for its "image."  In spite of their undoubted intelligence - it is manifest in many memos from their pens - they also believed that politics is but a variety of public relations and were taken in by all the bizarre psychological premises underlying this belief.

Still, they obviously were different from the ordinary image makers.  Their distinction lies in that they were problem solvers as well, hence they were not just intelligent but prided themselves on being "rational,"  and they were indeed to a rather frightening degree above "sentimentality" and in love with "theory," the world of sheer mental effort.  They were eager to find formulae, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, which would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them,  that is, they were eager to discover "laws" by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be.

I'll break in again to point out this is a description of what could be considered the liturgical language of materialist enlightenment scientism in which the trappings of mathematical logic and science replace late classical Greek, late stage Latin, early Slavonic or otherwise dead languages and incense. In a Protestant context, early 17th century literary English.  Perhaps that was as deceptively and superficially persuasive to the men who generated it as they hoped it would be to their intended audience because of that. Such absurdity is certainly part of the stock-in-trade of the pseudo-social-sciences and other such over-attenuated fraudulent mimicking of scientific method and mathematics. If you object to me pointing out the pseudo-scientific nature of those things which pretend to deal with human behavior, something which is, in every way "man made" consider the next sentence and the rest of the paragraph.

However, unlike the natural scientist who deals with matters which, whatever their origin, are not man-made or man-enacted, and which therefore can be observed, understood, and eventually even changed only through the most meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality, the historian as well as the politician deals with human affairs which owe their existence to man's capacity for action, and that means, to man's relative freedom from things as they are.  Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past as well.  In so far as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist's patience to wait until his theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts.  Instead they will be tempted to fit their reality - which, after all, is man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise - into their theory, thus mentally getting rid of a disconcerting contingency.

Reason's aversion to contingency is very strong - it was Hegel, the father of modern utopian thinking, who held that "philosophical contemplation has no other intention than to eliminate the accidental."  Indeed much of the modern arsenal of political theory - the game theories and systems analyses, the scenarios, written for imagined "audiences," and the careful enumeration of usually three "options" A,B,C, whereby A and C represent the opposite extremes and B the "logical" middle-of-the-road "solution" of the problem - has its source in this deep-seated aversion. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions.  The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, and therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgement for the multitude of real possibilities.  What these problem-solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this should be possible because of the inherent contingency of these facts.  

It strikes me that this is also a huge temptation and common practice of the highest and most theoretical reaches of the legal profession, Oliver Wendell Holmes certainly wanted to do something like this in his attempt to make the law more like what he imagined to be science in order to achieve scientific predictability in the law.  That what might have been predictable was merely an illusion based on his dreamed of methodology, inapt to real life and certainly not producing justice would certainly not have worried such a lofty thinker.  The higher the judge, the more removed from consequences they seem to be.  The, I hope dying or dead, fashion of "neuro-law" that I read about about decade ago is probably an even more decadent development of something similar, aping, though, not physics but the "behavioral and cognitive sciences" as revealed in the man-made, artificial, multi-color brain images of fMRI.  In the Roberts Court the getting rid of facts is certainly the basis of most of its Republican-fascist majority opinions these days, many of those very obviously reliable facts disregarded those of science.

If you don't think I am almost irresistibly tempted to take up just about each and every point of this to point out that what Arendt criticizes reeks of 18th-20th century "enlightenment" thinking, you must not have read much of what I've written here.  She noted that the "problem-solvers" tried to copy what they believed physicists could do, one of my central criticisms of the "enlightenment" and all of those alleged sciences which operate far, far outside of the realms where you really can follow scientific method.  In that they prove they are certainly stuck in the 19th if not 18th century view of science because one of the greatest achievements of modern science and mathematics was to explode that myth that those most exigent fields of logic and scientific method produced an absolute view of reality.  

I will forego that long digression to point out something I didn't realize before last night, that I'd read some of her essay in reading Joesph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason, in which he cites this section of the essay to point the same thing out in a different context of popular and scientific gullibility.

Surely, much of what we today regard as good and useful, as well as much of what we would call knowledge and wisdom, we owe to science.  But science may also be seen as an addictive drug.  Not only has our unbounded feeding on science caused us to become dependent on it, but as happens with many other drugs taken in increasing dosages, science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison.  Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for the establishment of a age of rationality, but with his vision of rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality.  Thus we have very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived from a higher standpoint.  Even murderous wars have come to be perceived as mere problems to be solved by hoards of professional problem solvers.  As Hannah Arendt said about recent makers and executors of policy in the Pentagon:

"They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being "rational" . . . They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them;  that is, they were eager to discover "laws" by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be . . . [They] did not "judge" they calculated . . . an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making."

And so too have nearly all political confrontations, such as those between races and those between the governed and their governors, come to be perceived as merely failures in communication.  Such rips in the social fabric can then be systematically repaired by the expert application of the latest information-handing techniques - at least so it is believed.  And so the rationality-is-logicality equation, which the very success of science has drugged us into adopting as virtually an axiom, has led us to deny the very existence of human conflict, hence the very possibility of the collision of genuinely incommensurable human interests of of disparate human values, hence the existence of humans themselves.

It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinnner argues.  If they are, then its presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do.  But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certainly knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves.[I went through one of A. S. Eddington's essay which made the same point a few years back.]  When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations.  No such sets of correspondences can ever be proven to be correct. At best, they can be falsified, in the sense that formal manipulations of a system's symbols may lead to symbolic configurations which, when read in the light of  set of correspondences in question, yield interpretations contrary to empirically observed phenomena.  Hence all empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored, not on bedrock as is commonly supposed, but on the sifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture and intuition.  It is not even true, again contrary to common belief, that a single purported counter-instance that, if accepted as genuine would certainly falsify a specific scientific theory, generally leads to the abandonment of that theory.  Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is the faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict.  In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.

The man on the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well proven as his own existence.  His certitude is an illusion.  Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion . . .

As Hanna Arendt derived from her reading of the Pentagon Papers, such faith in scientific method and logicality well outside of where it can honestly be applied is hardly just a habit of the common Person.  This denomination of scientistic faith is the real faith tradition of most of us with college credentials or merely an exposure to media, even those who deny some of the most well established science, such as the science of human caused climate change and it more than has its match in lawerly and, especially judicial arrogance which uses the same framing but with even very good science available to it, will dispose of both science and evidence and reality, though they will go through a charade of logicality, such as Alito does, a going through motions which some of his younger fellow "justices" seem to not feel they need to go through as a charade.  The habits of scientific method, the pretenses of modern educated thought to follow logicality in the decadent state of eutrophic "enlightenment" culture are, perhaps like those matters that Arendt notes are the object of public lying:

The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts, that is with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.

This pose of logicality, of scientific thought which, Weizenbaum notes that science is very much like a game in which the method is to follow the human made rules of the game. The pretense is that there is no other means of arriving at reliable truth that should be consequential in human law.  No wonder the Supreme Court so breezily lies about the nature of the Bill of Rights, misrepresenting when it doesn't totally ignore the legislative record of the 14th Amendment in their games of "originalism" and "textualism", the necessity of the Voting Rights Act in such a decadent intellectual environment which, nevertheless, poses as if it has all of the presumed virtues of both science and logicality while pursuing the most raw and ruthless of power and oppression.  

A Note: In what I said the other day about the role that cinematic and video fantasy and sci-fi play in such things as the crackpot idea that Biden and NOAA can control the direction of a hurricane, talking more about it, it occurs to me that the "science" in sci-fi often, maybe typically presents science and technology as ultimately powerful, either now or in some past long ago and far away or in some maybe even human future.  It is omnipotent and omniscient.  You can add that to the list of gods of materialism, I suppose.  That so many more People imbibe that non-reality than have much of a familiarity with real science and entirely more than who have any real knowledge of the actual limits of science is certainly not a trivial matter when it comes to the gullibility of up to millions of us to such delusions.  The insistence that such a thing could not have any significant effect strikes me as being just as absurd as the belief that science and technology have such ridiculously claimed powers now.
 

"The Constitution was not created by "the whole people" as the jurists have said; neither was it created by "the states" as Southern nullifiers long contendedThat is not any accidental issue or mere unimportant detail - Hate Mail

BEING TAKEN UP with going over some of Hannah Arendt's observations in her essay Lying in Politics, I don't have the time to cite and look up all of the necessary citations that Charles Beard and other have made in their debunkery of the common received lies about the nature of the United States Constitution which Republican-fascists, in state governments, in the federal government, especially on the Roberts-Alito Supreme Court use to destroy even the limited democracy which Americans have, through enormous expenditures of blood, work and tears, forced onto that document, especially People of Color and Women who were excluded from the start.  

The resort of those who want equality and justice of coming up with citations of the document and logical convolutions to make that document provide what the Declaration of Independence promised, equal rights, equal justice, government of, by and FOR The People has not worked, the great episodes in our history that led lots of us to believe it would work, the abolition movement even the Civil War ended up with things going back to much as they had been, albeit without de jure slavery, the struggle to expand the vote to, first, propertyless white men, then Women, then People of Color and others, the great Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century which achieved the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the anti-poverty programs enacted in the same period have successfully been pushed back by the oligarchs and their lackeys in government and, especially, on the Supreme Court to the point where even those relatively in on the con job are afraid for what of democracy they once depended on.  The Roberts Court, put into place with Republican-fascist corruption and the wealth of millionaires and billionaires playing the Constitutional system should be the end of that illusion that the document as it was and even as we have managed to amend it is reliable or even safe.

I'm done with pretending I believe that lie when history as it's passing before my eyes proves it is a lie and, whether told by Parson Weems or Lin-Manuel Miranda, it is an anti-democratic, anti equality mythology that props up what we are again finding to be a millstone around the neck of exactly those it was originally written to keep down.

I do have the time to type out the Conclusions Charles Beard drew from his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States which, in the Dover republication I'm typing from, are on pages 324 and 325.  I will leave it to you to do what I know you won't, read the book and look up his citations to see that he quotes and refers to them honestly in coming to his conclusions. If I had time I would quote from some of the more exigent of more recent historians to support my belief in what he said, but that will have to wait.  I will note that Beard uses a few words according to old meanings that those of us today are unfamiliar with.  He was especially prone to using the word "personality" to mean "personal" or "private" as in private property or private interests.  Since this is a response to hate mail, I've inserted a few explanatory terms into Beard's text, for the dope who objected, not as an insult to literate readers.

CONCLUSIONS

At the close of this long and arid survey - partaking of the nature of catalogue - it seems worth while to bring together the important conclusions for political science which the data presented appear to warrant.

The movement for the Constitution of the United States was originated and carried through principally by four groups of personality [personal] interests which had been adversely affected under the Articles of Confederation: money, public securities, manufactures and trade and shipping.

The first firm steps toward the formation of the Constitution were taken by a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors.

No popular vote was taken directly or indirectly on the proposition to call the Convention which drafted the Constitution.

Here we have the first of the acts reneging on the promises made by, among others, many of the principle participants in both fomenting the revolution for independence from Britain and the formation of the Constitution, the claim that the only legitimate government was had by the consent of those governed by it.  If you think that's an unimportant detail, it is the very thing that defines the difference between an egalitarian democracy and some species of illegitimate government by gangsters and thugs, everything from the most genteel and most perfumed and manicured to the most brutally ruthless, which all other forms of government are.  

It is not an unimportant detail that the large majority of People, not only Black and other People of Color were excluded from the formation of the government of what was becoming the United States, all Women were so excluded. Even most White Men who were excluded by their relative poverty from voting or participating in the formation of the structure of government but were also excluded from the process of accepting the Constitution.  

It is against this which all of those groups and others have had to fight from the start, it is those groups which the Roberts Court and virtually all previous Courts have ruled against in the very terms of the Constitution which the "originalists" divine the "original intent" of "the founders" to favor the very groups which decided all issues of the original Constitution. The minor occasions on which the Court has gone against that characteristic practice are, in fact, minor and as the Roberts Court is proving, what the Court can give on the basis of its reading of the document and their fear of the reaction if they don't grant some measure of justice, subsequent courts will FAR MORE EASILY take away.

That is not any accidental issue or mere unimportant detail, it is the key to understanding most of the history of government under the Constitution and why it is still an extreme danger to equality and democracy today.  Much of the destruction of the progress we've made since the government was set up is being undermined and destroyed, today, by gatherings of such rich men who, to an extent, allow their gangster women in on some of it, too.  Always be suspicious of the rich, in every age they will, by and large, be the enemies of equality, democracy and equal justice.

A large propertyless mass was, under the prevailing suffrage [voting] qualifications, excluded at the outset from participation (through representatives) in the work of framing the Constitution.

Certainly we see that this is exactly the scheme of Republican-fascism and the Roberts Court in their destruction of the Voting Rights Act, to make sure that People of Color, others who they don't believe will vote for those who will support their interests as opposed to the rich and Republican.  Again, it is no accident that the Alitos, the Roberts, the other Republican-fascists on the Court and in state governments are recreating the very conditions that the original founders depended on to exclude the majority of even white men from the business of government.

The members of the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the Constitution were, with a few exceptions, immediately, directly and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of the new system.

The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.  

The major portion of the members of the Convention are on record as recognizing the claim of property to a special and defensive position in the Constitution.

In the ratification of the Constitution, about three-fourths of the adult males failed to vote on the question, having abstained from the elections at which delegates to the state conventions were chosen, either on account of their indifference or their disfranchisement by property qualifications.

No doubt those who make excuses for the sleaziness of the operation will make hay out of the speculation that a lot of that non-participating 3/4ths were slackers who couldn't be bothered to vote.  I would point out that a lot of them may not have had the luxury of finding out what the rich men in Philadelphia and their lackeys in the several states were up to until it was a done deal.  The state of journalism and the dissemination of news, especially among the rural underclass is hard enough to imagine today, but it was the condition that most of those who the founders proposed to govern were in.  Consider how long it took slaves in many parts of the rural South to find out that they weren't supposed to be enslaved anymore, and that was in a period when communication and the news was not only far more developed but the actual governments of the defeated Confederate states was in the hands of those who favored the abolition of slavery.  The founders and their allies in the states knew that they were working against the interests of most of those who the process excluded, starting with those who could not meet the property requirements to vote which, in many of the states, including those we, today, like to think of as the most democratic, were quite high, restricting the vote to the affluent.

And, as I never will stop pointing out, never underestimate the role that widely dispersed lies plays in such "votes" as in those Republican-fascist robo-calls that are aimed at driving down voter participation among People of Color, etc. And those such as the idiot principled non-voters who discourage the participation of those who could vote.  I wish I could personally punch out every preening, posing asshole on the play-left who has discouraged voting among idiot lefties who listened to them and the asshole magazine publishers who published their bullshit.

The Constitution was ratified by a vote of probably not more than one-sixth of the adult males.

It is questionable whether a majority of the voters participating in the elections for the state conventions in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia and South Carolina, actually approved the ratification of the Constitution.

Beard makes a very good case that in many states the process was intentionally  corrupt, either by obvious intent or by how it actually happened.  

The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia Convention;  and in a large number of instances they were also directly and personally interested in the outcome of their efforts.

In the ratification, it became manifest that the line of cleavage for and against the Constitution was between substantial personality [personal] interest on the one hand and the small farming and debtor interest on the other.

I would love to go farther into studying the extent to which the 1800 Jeffersonian revolution was the assertion of the interests of the losers in the original Constitutional battle and, to some partial extent, the modification of the original scheme of the framers on behalf of those white men who must still have had the power to force an expansion of the franchise at the state level and to have otherwise been able to wrest something like an imperfect democracy out of the fat cats.  The eclipse of the Federalist Party and, eventually, the Federalist majority on the Supreme Court under the Jacksonian revolution on behalf of, especially, the interest of small holders in the Western states is, I think, accurately considered a repudiation of "originalism" though the affluent, the slave holders and their current progeny in Republican-fascism have proven to be quite adaptive in regaining and maintaining control, especially through the most anti-democratic branch of the government, the Supreme Court.   I will point out that neither the Jeffersonians nor the Jacksonians or those who believe or claim they are inheritors of those traditions can honestly claim that what they hold is "originalist" or "textualist" because what they did was certainly not part of the intent of those who gathered in Philadelphia to illegally construct a new government nor the state ratification conventions which were, by and large, rigged by men who would have disdained either of those two innovations to slightly expand the base of those who got to vote and those who they voted for to represent their own "personality interests." 

And perhaps the most important point in understanding how the Republican-fascists are destroying democracy, using the popular delusions about that document and American history.

The Constitution was not created by "the whole people" as the jurists have said; neither was it created by "the states" as Southern nullifiers long contended;  but it was the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope.

If you want to see how this truth as opposed the those two myths of national origin is important, watch what the Roberts-Alito Court using arguments derived from that of the "Southern nullifiers" on behalf of Republican-fascists who don't want Black People voting or having representation in the state or federal government, and, really, pretty much all of those who they can't count on voting for Republican-fascists.  The rest of us who tolerate this because of the myths of "the founders" are suckers for it based on falsified history and hagiographic biography of even some of the shadiest of them.  

American history as most of us get it from hagiographic biography, false history, and mostly from some show-biz or fiction source, is about as accurate as the idea that Rome's similarly deified founding fathers were nourished on wolf-milk.  

Really Clueless Hate Mail

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES that Newt Gingrich, Marjory Taylor Greene, Ron Desantis, etc. believes in a. God, b. the Gospel of Jesus, c. the difference between lies and truth, morality and immorality, right and wrong, etc.  is either too stupid to pay attention to or one of their fellow blasphemers.  And the blasphemers don't believe it, either.  It's a total con job and cons are probably among the least susceptible to their fellow con men.

The alleged conversion of Gingrich is, as he probably lyingly claims was a result of the papacy of Benedict XVI (and his third marriage to his fellow adulterer, Calixta Bisek)  should be among the scandals of that generally hypocritical papacy.   I am at a loss for why it isn't a topic brought up by right-wing Catholics when they rail against proposals for allowing even non-adulterers who divorced and remarried once to receive communion, only I'm not really surprised.   The quality of right-wing Catholic conversion is quite discreditably low.

Did you really think I thought Newt Gingrich and Mag Greene really believe what they spout?    If you believe that why don't you believe every other lie that comes out of their lying mouths? 

Arendt On The Corruption Of Culture By The Methods Of Advertising

Hannah Arendt continued:

To the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties.  There is, first, the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.  Public relations is a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy.  The trouble with the mentality of the public relations man is that he deals only in opinions and "good will," the readiness to buy;  that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.  This means that for his inventions it may indeed look as though the sky is the limit, for he lacks the politician's power to act, to "create" facts, and thus that simple everyday reality which sets limits to power and brings the forces of imagination down to earth.

Notice that Arendt was careful to specify the innocuousness of Madison avenue with the warning that its harmlessness was merely apparent.  Advertising is expected to be a series of "little white lies" but if the path to hell can be paved with good intentions, even small lies are a far more common pavement for that superhighway. If there was ever a true domino theory, it is that small lies habituate us to accepting huge ones.

Other than, perhaps, the New York Times and Washington Post on a national level and a few other print-on-paper sources regionally or locally, the politically significant media in the United States is the electronic media, the networks, the cabloids and others. Significant, also, are Republican-fascist hate-talk radio, with influential online sources. Some of which might be called "journalism" with some accuracy but most of them are nothing like what should be called that (though many "journalists" seem to consider them that). Starting with the beginning of radio advertising and sponsorship, electronic media has always been even more a creature of the same kind as the public relations industry.  Advertising is what has financed most effective media, organs of "journalism" and, even more so, the entertainment media, print and electronic, which is also associated with supposedly informative media.  You have to have an audience and an audience has to be persuaded to read or listen or watch.  The previous passage from Hannah Arendt's brilliant essay, Lying in Politics, noted that lies can be crafted to be a far easier sell than the truth almost ever can be.  I will forego the temptation to, once again, point to the criticism of the entertainment sections of newspapers and magazines, something that the brilliant Karl Krauss fingered as dumbing down the population and polluting what most people took to be journalism in the period of WWI, thus playing a major role in producing that world-changing catastrophe.  Little did he know how bad radio and the movies and later TV and the internet which he could have known nothing about  would be in that regard.

It is essential to note in regard to the role that the media can play in this that the truth is often a. concealed by those who generate the facts that constitute truth and don't want the public to know them, b. even when not actively concealed, truths are often not given out freely but must be actively obtained to tell them when public knowledge of them is not in the interest of those who hold them, c. because of those two things, professional, paid reporters are needed to get that information and so the truth is far more expensive to the media companies and the corporations and billionaires owning them, who may share in the very same motives of concealment.  The economics of reporting as opposed to peddling opinion and that interest in manipulating "information" leads inevitably in commercial media to the dominant traffic in "opinion 'journalism'" and the overt peddling in lies that Rupert Murdoch has turned from scorned tabloid trash to mainstream "journalism."  Which is exactly what the porn merchant's American citizenship was expedited to facilitate on behalf of Republicans and the wealthy, in general.  And, as many of us predicted almost forty years ago, that was the effect of him and his journalistic presstitutes and pimps doing in the United States what he had previously done in Australia and Britain.

When the First Amendment talks about "the press" when Thomas Jefferson made his celebrated and idiotic statement about preferring newspapers to governments when he certainly knew we could have both, all of those facts about published lies were already true in the age of page-at-a-time printing presses.  They were true in the earliest ages of recorded human history.

In my recent review of Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the complaints about the journalism and pamphleteer against the adoption of the Constitution among the likes of Adams, Jefferson and Madison proves the peddling of inaccurate information, or what they would have taken as lies was known to them, some of their allies participated in it, too.  Which makes the silence of the First Amendment on the difference between publishing the truth and publishing lies all the more notable.

Perhaps they took such a truth as there being no right to lie was so self-evident that they didn't need to codify the difference.  I cannot believe that the other politicians who had a hand in writing it didn't understand the serious and dangerous character of lies and the desirability, in general, of truths being known, perhaps their neglect to make certain that that distinction between "the press" publishing lies and the press publishing the truth was differentiated.  

But the framers of the Bill of Rights may not have anticipated a later development in the amoral materialist "enlightenment" they believed they favored, such as in the post-WWII period in which the highest level of the college credentialed class would decide that the plain language reading of the First Amendment meant that laws against slander and libel, which had been in place since the time of the adoption of the Constitution, were unconstitutional.*  In that period the alternative to a law suit may have been a duel to the death, as the one that ended Alexander Hamilton's political career and gave a lying Broadway musical its melodramatic and dishonest denouement.  Whatever the reasons for it, that likely innocent  neglect in making that distinction has been a serious and dangerous fact of life in the United States for the past fifty-eight years.  As Hannah Arendt's essay written during the Nixon years proves, the position of lies in our elections and the politics that are generated by those elected was already a serious danger that was responsible for the deaths of many tens and hundreds of thousands.  

The only limitation to what the public relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be "manipulated" to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated - though, of course they can be forced by terror - to "buy" opinions and political views.  Hence the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.  But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lights;  the only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot-and-stick approach.

The reign of lies has, obviously, gone to the point of the use of broadcast and cable and, especially, online distributed terror peddled to a susceptible, gullible and, in so many cases, entirely prepared audience to have that influence their actions.  The high emotional experience of terror seems to be an addictive mental state, though I don't get it at all, no more than I get slasher movies and thrillers.  That addiction is certainly a consciously used political tool, especially on the American fascist far-right, which is practically the only right we have, now.  It is certain that the wife of at least one of the Supreme Court "justices" is a true believer in such thrilling terror and, by his rulings and talk, her husband is justifiably believed to be all-in on that, or at least the use of it to his own demented ends.

It is not surprising that the recent generation of intellectuals, who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is "image making" and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery, should almost automatically fall back on the older adages of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for theory.  For the, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people for whom carrot-and-stick methods don't work either.

I don't believe that Hannah Arendt would have agreed with me but I think that observation made about the cynicism and nihilism of intellectuals is a direct result of the widespread adoption of materalism as the ideology of the intellectual class and the moral nihilism that is usually a part of that.  But that's, of course, a somewhat different argument because if there is one thing that is certain about American conservatism and Trump era Republican fascism, that moral nihilism is not an exclusive holding of intellectual materialism but is rampant in the vulgar materialism which so many of those among them who profess religion the loudest really hold.** Of course, that is exactly what The Gospel, the Epistles,' The Law and the Prophets' critique of religion is, so that should always have made unsurprising to those who took them seriously.  I may go back to commenting on Jeremiah soon.

Oddly enough the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States.  Because of the immensity of his job he must surround himself with advisers, the "National Security Managers" as they have recently been called by Richard J. Barnet, who "exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.  The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in the country whose range of choices can be predetermined.

I have to think of Rahm Emannuel's role in the Obama Administration when I read this and how he certainly didn't encourage Obama to take advantage of the best hand a Democratic President had been given by the Voters since 1964, though I see no evidence that Obama, likely among the five smartest men to have ever held that office, had any intention of taking bold action to create the justice and equality that his campaign publicity and image claimed he would.  I could say almost the same thing about another remarkably intelligent Democratic President, Bill Clinton and his Chiefs of Staff.  I think it is remarkable that Joe Biden has been far more aggressive in pursuing extensive building of that than the younger, more media savvy Obama and Clinton. I often have to remind myself that Biden's Congressional career started about the time this essay was published as an anti-war Congressman.  

This, of course, can happen only if the Executive branch has cut itself off from the legislative powers of Congress;  it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is both deprived of and reluctant to exercise its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs.  One of the Senate's functions, as we now know, is to shield the decision making process from the transient moods and trends of society at large, in our case, the antics of the consumer society and the public relations managers who cater to them.

As I mentioned the world of a half a century ago even as seen by one of the most acute as well as insightful intellectuals of the time can seen quaint, so far have things gone to hell.  It would be impossible to imagine a Republican-fascist Senate playing the role or being as circumspect as Hannah Arendt could still claim.  It is certain that the two Republican-fascist quislings with "D" after their names holding up Democratic legislation are still pretending something like that description still holds, the better for them to ratfuck President Biden's agenda.  Far from Republicans in the Senate and a Republican president acting as checks on each other, they go from collaboration to collusion with each other to steal the commonwealth and destroy electoral democracy to maintain themselves in power.  The Bush vs. Gore case adds the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court to that and I have no doubt that the Roberts court ratfucking of elections will continue that partisan Supreme Court corruption.  

In the Republican-fascist practice of promoting and selecting entertainment media figures as presidential candidates such as Reagan and Trump, both of them having roles not honestly held to be apart from the interests of the advertisers in their show-biz careers, the melding of the con-job that advertising is and the con-job of electing politicians dedicated to the interests of the wealthy elite to the cost of the large majority of Americans is a machine that is reaching perfection.  The alleged journalistic profession, the really politically important part of that in the largest, especially electronic media are already all-in, or virtually so, with the same interests. Only next time they will choose someone more like Bush II who is less disturbingly vulgar to those still pretending that there is something higher to what they do. Assuming they can peddle someone less cruelly demented than Desantis to the Republican-fascist base and gulled independents.

As the lying to sell the invasion of Iraq, only one of the two disastrous wars of the Bush II-Cheney administration, following on Bush I's Gulf War (perhaps incited by his ambassador, April Glaspie) proves, there were no lessons learned from the revelations of caution or morality derived from the Pentagon Papers and the disaster that the American war in Vietnam was.  Of course, there were people, especially in the Republican right whose only lesson from Vietnam was to be more ruthless in selling a disastrous war for the benefit of private interests.  The unmaking of the hard wisdom gained from the disaster of Vietnam was by and large accomplished as much through movies and TV shows lying about it, especially in the period beginning with Reagan's presidency, as it was on talk TV and radio.

I should also point out that America's war-making in Vietnam expanded into other countries, something not revealed,. as I recall, until after Arendt wrote her essay and published it.  That should stand as deadly a confirmation of her observations on the danger of political lies if not my point that to the extent possible, those lies should be discouraged and suppressed as well as refuted, refutation of lies requiring truths that have all of the more problematic features of unpleasant and surprising truth as opposed to lies lied with the art of advertising for easy sale.  

* Of the many extremely important points Hannah Arendt brought up in her essay on the role that lying played in bringing the United States into the self-made quagmire that the Vietnam war was, I would very much like to go into her brilliant analysis of the similarities and differences between the technocratic "problem solvers" of the Kennedy through Nixon administrations and the ex-communist neo-cons whose theoretical approach in replacement of reality.  I think, in an important way, the technocrats and the degenerate intellectual cold-warriors had one common point, both of them believed in an essentially materialistic ideology.  Her explanation of the foundational error of the technocrats faith in the calculability of reality was, I realized last night, something which Joseph Weizenbaum noted in the only part of her essay which I believe I had read before last week.  I will probably base another post on that issue.  

** For the entire history of Christianity, especially in the period of its political potency, the enormous record of discrediting discredit earned for "Christianity" has almost always come as a result of those who openly, obviously and flagrantly violated the moral teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc. What could be rightly considered the Mammonism that Jesus said was contradictory to the religion that he taught is almost always the unspoken faith of those who did those things.  No one who honestly and carefully followed the teachings of Jesus would have earned the same kind of discredit for Christianity.  The Republican-fascist Bible thumpers are, to a person, Mammonists, whether Southern Baptist, "evangelical" Pentacostalist or "traditionalist" Roman Catholics (and a very large percentage of the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops) are full blown worshipers of Mammon.  They are also, for the most part, habitual liars. I've seen their media, honesty is not its stock in trade.
 

lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality

I HAD NEVER READ or listened to Hannah Arendt's virtuoso essay Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers until I recently found that Youtube of her delivering it in her wonderful voice, from there finding a printed version of it as it appeared in The New York Review of Books half a century ago.  This passage shocked me because she says something I'd concluded on my own but had never read anyone else had noticed before, that the truth is at a number of disadvantages which lies are unencumbered by.  

The truth has to conform to reality no matter how unattractive or unappealing whereas lies can assume any form which will sell to a weak and gullible target for them, using the con-man's greatest weapon, the weakness of the mark, their own widely shared moral and other failings. The optimism of the absurd "enlightenment" notion that the truth will come out reliably on top in a contest with lies, something I've become entirely skeptical of is something I wish I had had the chance to discuss with Arendt because I both see it reflected in her claims and the basis for coming to my pessimistic conclusion about it is also contained in her text.  The silence of the First Amendment on the right to tell the truth and that there is no such a thing as a right to lie, because of this difference in the powers of persuasion between them, is and will always be an extreme danger embedded into the very parts of the Constitution and American civic piety which we are required to hold as having the most venerable of moral authority.  

Here is the passage taken out of the entire essay, every sentence of which is worthy of study and commenting on.  She was a spectacularly brilliant thinker. That her observations and what should have been warnings have had no impact on American, British or so many other would-be liberal democracies is, itself, an example of the fragility of the truth and the durability of lies as a political force. I will insert a few comments.  

Hence,when we talk about lying and especially about lying among active men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for that reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.  The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts, that is with matters which carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are; factual truths are never compellingly true.  The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily lives;  it is always a danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.  Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.  For this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt - as secure and shielded against attack as, for instance, the statement that two and two makes four.

It is this fragility that makes deception so easy up to a point, and so tempting.  It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were;  lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.  He has prepared  his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we were not prepared.

In short, lying uses all of the same tools as the specialized type of lying that is a con job as put over by a con man on a targeted and, so often, self-deceiving mark.  Trump's stock in trade. 

In America's winner-takes-all political system, that point is effectively surpassed over and over again, the fixed time-periods of terms of office, everything from two years for the House, four for presidents, six for senators, the from here to eternity which the founders idiotically gave to Supreme Court "justices" means that the lie only has to work to the point of getting them elected.  The myth of, for example, presidential impeachment, the impeachment of Supreme Court "justices" and the near impossibility of expelling even obviously criminal Republican Senators (Packwood being sent packing in shame seems a thing from a quaint and lost past).  The very terms set in stone on the U.S. Constitution set in stone an easily surpassed point beyond which, for the duration of the term of office gained through lies or the lifetime for a Clarence Thomas or Alito or, I'll bet you anything, a lying, perjuring Kavanaugh, makes the fact that they are known liars moot in terms of politics and the law.  That Leonard Leo and Lindsay Graham (his stage managing of Mrs. Alito's flood of tears)and the as vile as senile Chuck Grassley can get a total creep on the Court for life where they can destroy democracy through the methods of advertising* is about as serious a truth as I'll present in this post.

I would contend with her observation "that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness," because human sinfulness is a consequence of choices, not accidents apart from human agency, human choice.  What she may have more accurately have meant would be that lies believed and repeated out of ignorance and laziness have an enormous political and social effect.  Both the intended lies and those that are a product of ignorance and laziness are important.  The Trumpian era rule that he would have had to have known he was lying in order to call it lying was set up to shield the most flagrant liar to have ever held the American persidency plays around with the distinction between the two.  The civil law can't be conducted on the basis of telepathy, though the idiotic Supreme Court has made it the law of the land that to punish many of the lies told, you do have to convince a jury and then judges up to and including the most political of them on the Supreme Court that your mind-reading is accurate.  

Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute;  no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer,  it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.  The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.  This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers' frightening confidence in the power of lying - [And the secular liberal confidence that lies are permissible because they are innocuous] - in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the "political line" of the present moment, or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology, such as unemployment in a socialist economy, simply by denying their existence;  the unemployed person becoming a non-person.

I hope that I am not right in thinking that the brilliant analysis of Hannah Arendt re the use of computers, etc. not being enough to defeat reality was premature, based on things like the state of computers and electronic media a half a century ago.  I think what she comes very close to here is the truth that, in the end, the difference between truth and lies is consequential in ways that will assert themselves, perhaps even breaking into the unreality that many, especially those most vulnerable to even low key advertising methods, live their lives in.  I got into an argument a few days ago with someone who was telling me about the Republican-fascist lunacy mill online accusing Biden and NOAA of manipulating the hurricane to hit Republican areas of Florida.  I said that I thought a lot of that was due to the amount of time Americans spend watching fantasy and sci-fi on TV and in the movies.  I think it is of consequence in accustoming people into susceptibility for such nonsense that they spend such an unprecedentedly large amount of their lives in fantasy and unreality, much of it carrying such absurd exaggerations of the ability of science and technology to do such things.  I said that I thought that even the lie machine of FOX and the rest of Republican-fascist media had less of an effect than the entertainment that a dangerous percentage of Americans and others substitute for time spent in reality. How does reality break through to those who have so little experience of it?

The most dangerous political and legal effects of lies have often accomplished their harm before reality delivers the undeniable consequences that come from the true nature of the lies the suckers bought and gave the power of their votes.  The power of such political and legal lies makes this method of correction too dangerous to rely on it to do everything up to saving the species from extinction.

I will go back to the first sentences of this quote:

Hence,when we talk about lying and especially about lying among active men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for that reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.

To which I say, yes, this is absolutely in keeping with the experience of the United States in the period in which we went from lies merely flourishing to lies swamping the truth even more in the period after the Supreme Court gave the media the ability to lie about politicians and other public figures with virtual impunity in 1964.  As I will almost never neglect to point out, the media being owned by corporations and Republican-fascist interests, those lies have been told, primarily and most impactfully, against liberals and Democrats. Lies told with the protection of the Warren Court's and the ACLU's reading of the First Amendment, have basically changed the media from what it was before.  FOX "news" as it is, as it has been, could not be if the old standards allowing public figures to sue media corporations and individuals who lied about them, the argument I had with my friend would have had far different terms and the online lying about Biden controlling hurricanes would probably not have remained up long enough to gain any traction with the suckers.

I would guess that if it were possible to really quantify the "moral outrage" of the media about lying that what that analysis might show is that far from "moral outrage" being enough to quell the lies, that it would generally be followed by an habituation to and subsequent normalization of and customization to even the most repulsive and obvious lies, which, from what I gather, CNN under its new ownership may be an example of.  There is a reason that "moral outrage" such as has political and real effects are more likely to be after the lies of James O'Keefe and his ilk are aired in the very same media which expresses "moral outrage" of the currently conventional kind.  After which innocent people lied about are about the only ones to pay the price, whether it is losing their career or a public-service to the least among us group such as ACORN is driven into extinction. In the mean time the liars, with funding from multi-millionaire and billionaire Republican-fascists, go on lying and the cable and other media keep playing their part in this.  

* To the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties.  There is, first, the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.  Public relations is a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy.  The trouble with the mentality of the public relations man is that he deals only in opinions and "good will," the readiness to buy;  that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.  This means that for his inventions it may indeed look as though the sky is the limit, for he lacks the politician's power to act, to "create" facts, and thus that simple everyday reality which sets limits to power and brings the forces of imagination down to earth.

The only limitation to what the public relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be "manipulated" to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated - though, of course they can be forced by terror - to "buy" opinions and political views.  Hence the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.  But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lights;  the only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot-and-stick approach.

It is not surprising tht the recent generation of intellectuals, who grew up in the insane atmosphere of rampant advertising and were taught that half of politics is "image making" and the other half the art of making people believe in the imagery, should almost automatically fall back on the older adages of carrot and stick whenever the situation becomes too serious for theory.  For the, the greatest disappointment in the Vietnam adventure should have been the discovery that there are people for whom carrot-and-stick methods don't work either.

I will probably have a post on this quote, soon.  I will point out that what Arendt said about intellectuals' thinking being damaged by the influence of rampant advertising is magnified by an extremely high power in the "journalism" which is financed by advertising and which so often bends and distorts its "reporting" with a mind if not an actual order from the advertisers, some of those being the very owners of the media.  Moral outrage to order is what you can expect from them without any actual moral content.   It's all advertising.  Yet Congress is to make no law ever taking that into account no matter what consequences reality eventually serves up to us.