Hannah Arendt told us: The lies are not meant to be believed, they are meant to make us not trust anyone about anything. And being unable to trust the information we’re given, we can’t make any choices because there are no sure safe trust-worthy choices.
And that’s why so many Americans stayed home on Election Day: Unable to make what they could believe would be a good choice they froze embraced apathy and disenfranchised themselves.
All Republican Presidents after Eisenhower prepared the ground for where we are now. One prime example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
Roy Cohn, young Trump’s mentor, taught him everything he knows and does. Cohn was not a nice man, the Mephistopheles to Trump’s Faust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn
We’ve lost trust in American government, in corporate entities since they were officially judged to be ‘persons,’ enabling the buying of all things, especially government and elections.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/the-citizens-united-decision-and-why-it-matters/
We have all been bombarded with lies: reconstructed facts, misleading information, selective ‘truth’ for our entire lives. It’s part of the human experience, that someone is always skewing reality to persuade us to buy whatever they’re selling: to believe what they need us to believe to hand over our money for their product.
The defense is in the ability to think clearly, critically about whatever is being offered both as fact and as product.
Who benefits most from me believing what they’re saying?
Follow the money!
Do I really need what they are saying I need?
What does their record reveal about their actual motives and accomplishments?
But critical thinking is not being taught as a basic life skill in America. Quite a lot is not being offered in public education, and private education has its own peculiar agendas.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonbusteed/2024/02/21/the-growing-discontent-with-american-education/
Just as we’ve leaned towards processed and ‘fast’ food, eating what pleases the mouth rather than what nurtures the body, we have shoved aside the joys of learning and knowing in favor of entertainment so flashy, how can anyone resist? Our lives stultify just like our blood vessels, filled with the plaque that comes from taking in what’s superficially seductive but has little actual meaning or value. We are full up and still devouring, and starving.
Actual social interaction has reduced itself to the two-dimensionality of a screen. Many of us would rather PM or text than make a phone call. We will check ourselves out rather than deal with other individuals. We buy things online and have them sent to us so we only minimally have to deal with the outside world. This is called ‘convenience’ but what else might it be called?
To have a thing delivered in a day or even less, that’s magically convenient, sparing us ever having to wait, to exercise a little patience. What is it for the real human people who have to make that magic happen?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon-next-day-delivery-deaths
Sitting and waiting for an appointment, for food at a restaurant, for the bus or the flight… Who sits there patiently with themselves anymore, watching the world go about its busy-ness, exploring their own thoughts and imaginations?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/people-prefer-electric-shocks-to-being-alone-with-their-thoughts/373936/
We are living in a warped, twisted, dysfunctional, anti-human society. It isn’t just the U.S. and it isn’t every community in the U.S. just as in any given community there is a considerable range of healthy to dysfunctional families. Likewise, in every human individual there are conflicting beliefs and imperatives that depending on immediate need or trigger, take over the decision-making. And when, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, there are times when we have lost trust in what our senses and feelings tell us, we freeze…
And someone out there, pulling strings and manipulating what our perceptions tell us, is benefitting from our bewildered dismay in the coinage of power–which often is, in fact, coinage.
Jan 7, 2025 by CL Redding
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 