Political Partisanship Is A Propaganda Lubricant
By Caitlin Johnstone
June 16, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - Studying the unfolding of the
new mainstream UFO narrative has been very
interesting, because it highlights the dynamics I
always talk about in a fresh light which makes them
easier to point to.
One theme that keeps resurfacing is people
marvelling at how low-key the public response to the
whole thing has been. One might expect the US
government officially stating that the military has
been frequently encountering strange unknown
aircraft of unthinkable technological advancement
would rank a little higher in public interest, but
so far that really hasn’t been the case.
A YouTuber recently summed up this sentiment with
a
13-minute rant about how weird it is that
everyone isn’t screaming about this all day long:
’ve seen numerous attempts to explain the
unexpectedly apathetic response to the fact that
UFOs are in the news every day now, the most common
being that people have so much on their plate these
days that even the possibility of extraterrestrials
buzzing US navy ships just doesn’t rank high on
their priorities. Others suggest that it’s such an
obvious military psyop that the public is dismissive
of the story.
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Neither of these offerings are particularly
convincing in my opinion. We see vapid nonsense
attracting mountains of public interest every day,
so the idea that people have no mental bandwidth for
this story doesn’t hold water. While the belief that
the UFO narrative looks like some kind of military
psyop is widely accepted among the sort of people
who’d be likely to read this article (I’ve been
saying it for
a while now myself), skepticism toward
suspicious US government claims is
not a very widespread posture for people to hold
in the mainstream public.
It seems pretty clear to me that the reason
there’s not as much public interest in this story as
you’d expect is because it doesn’t fit neatly into
any of the little boxes that people have been
trained to file news into in this society. There’s
no partisan angle to it, so it doesn’t appeal to any
of the egoic constructs to which the general public
tends to hook incendiary news stories.
The likelihood of a news story going viral in our
society has little to do with its newsworthiness,
its unusualness, or even whether or not it is
factually accurate. The single most likely factor in
whether or not a news story will have mass appeal is
whether it appears to validate the worldview of one
of the two mainstream political factions. This is
why the mainstream media have been
deliberately sowing partisan divisiveness and
marketing toward increasingly distant partisan echo
chambers instead of just reporting the news; they
have an obvious profit motive to do so, because
tickling people’s egos with hate porn and illusory
validation is the best way to get clicks and
generate ad revenue.
This is why those who promoted the theory that
Trump was a secret Russian agent
saw their ratings
soar for years before it was
conclusively discredited by the very Special
Counsel they’d been literally
singing Christmas carols and
lighting prayer candles to until then. There is
more evidence that space aliens are cruising around
in Earth’s atmosphere than there ever was that
Vladimir Putin had covertly infiltrated the highest
levels of the US government, but because it inflamed
liberal passions and made them feel like their
partisan worldview was about to be vindicated any
minute, it sold like crack.
You can immediately tell if something is going to
go viral by how politically tinged it is and how
mainstream the appeal of those politics are. A story
about how schools want to make your kids
transgender. A popular conservative acting like an
idiot. A black Trump supporter saying Trump isn’t
racist. Marjorie Taylor Greene doing literally
anything. Take it too far outside the mainstream,
like the US government getting caught
tampering with an OPCW investigation in Syria
for example, and you won’t see a ton of clicks, but
if it appeals to tens of millions of mainstream
partisans you will.
In a society that’s enslaved to egoic
consciousness as ours is, the things that generate
the most public interest will be those which flatter
or infuriate common egoic constructs. This is not
unique to politics; advertisers have raked in vast
fortunes by associating products with common
cultural mind viruses like body image issues and
personal inadequacy, and TV show hosts like Jerry
Springer and Maury Povich figured out decades ago
that you can attract massive ratings by letting
people feel smug and superior at the sight of poor
and uneducated guests acting out emotionally.
To make something go viral, it needs
to appeal to the ego. Advertisers understand this.
Media executives understand this. Propagandists
understand this.
The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public's Trust
"There's no point admonishing the mainstream press for the public's plummeting trust in it, because a thing that has only ever existed to administer propaganda can't suddenly become journalism."https://t.co/1LN9q8dtRQ
Creating big psychological identity structures
out of our politics makes the job of the
propagandists so very much easier; it’s like a
lubricant which lets mass-scale psyops glide
smoothly into public consciousness. From there it’s
a very easy task to get people hating Russia or
China for this or that partisan reason, or to get
people believing Trump or Biden are helping the
American people despite their both continuing and
expanding the same murderous and oppressive status
quo of their predecessors.
This is why the partisan divide is the most
heated and contentious it’s ever been, while the
actual behavior of each mainstream party when it’s
in power brings in
only the most superficial of changes. The
oligarchs who own the political/media class desire
the continuation of the status quo upon which they
have built their empire, but they also want to keep
the public as plugged in as possible to the partisan
perspectives which facilitate the propaganda that
cages our minds.
The solution to this, on an individual level, is
to dismantle any egoic attachment you might have to
either of the mainstream political factions which
preserve the status quo. This includes any
attachment to the
phony populism of progressive Democrats, and it
includes any attachment to the
phony populism of Trumpian Republicans. These
factions within the mainstream factions are
themselves propaganda constructs which will never be
permitted to advance any agenda that isn’t desired
by the oligarchic empire; they serve only to keep
people who would be inclined to reject mainstream
politics plugged in to mainstream politics.
And of course the ultimate solution to this
problem is for humanity to awaken from the ego. All
propaganda relies on egoic hooks in public
consciousness to circulate itself, so if humanity
begins dropping its habit of creating psychological
identity structures altogether (which it
looks like it
might), we will become harder and harder to
propagandize. Since humanity’s collective problems
ultimately boil down to the fact that sociopaths
manipulate our minds at mass scale, such a
transformation would make a healthy new world not
just possible but inevitable.
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