Understanding The Mechanics Of Political And Corporate Lies

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Those involved in politics — the politicians, reporters and corporate lobbyists — are constantly lying. We all know it, we just don’t all appreciate the scope of it. Of course, there is outright lying which might be done in any number of ways, including complete conjuration and outright elimination of important information. However corporate heads, politicians and their faithful media normally prefer more nuanced presentations to their lies — so it pays to understand just how they go about it.

There is no wild “conspiracy theory” here, just a matter of linking the dots. Those with the greatest access to information in our oligarchical society are correspondingly the greatest liars to our society. That is how oligarchies are built – not by gaining the explicit agreement of the people to an inequitable ‘pyramid’ society, but by the covert and gradual creation of illusions to which the people progressively succumb. Oligarchs employ the addition, subtraction, division and multiplication of information to influence the minds of its society, gain its ongoing “consent” to remain at the bottom of the illusory pyramid.

Justifying War: “Just” Wars (Part 2)

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President Obama has said that he and other Americans are weary, fatigued of war. That may well suit his own thinking, but I think American’s weariness is more than just fatigue at the presence of conflict; it’s an exhaustion with the justifying of it all.

Author Herman Wouk put it best, in the words of Julien Benda, a character in his book, ‘The Winds of War.’ He wrote: “Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.”

Barack Obama, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, actually used that occasion which celebrated peace to lay down justifications for war; ‘Just Wars’ he called them. The new president wrapped his militarism in a blanket of history in his acceptance speech in Oslo. He spoke with the detachment of a professor lecturing students about a “living testimony” to the “moral force” of the teachings of King and Gandhi; a U.S. president who just happened to be commander-in-chief over dual, bloody occupations.

Should Institutions Have A Right To Secrets In A Free And Open Society?

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It is impossible to say what transpires in secret institutional meetings. Perhaps secret meetings are concerned with the orchestration of world peace, cures for disease and the eradication of poverty. Heck, maybe they are deciding when the best time would be to release their perpetual motion machine! But I doubt it. Whatever the subjects, whatever the group, they believe commoners do not need to know. And that in itself is a problem.

The notion of secret institutions and secretive decision-making are in direct opposition to the stated objectives of our free and open society, which employs institutions to serve its needs. For this reason, institutional secrets simply should not be. Institutions make plans within conceptualizations that do not recognize the individual, but which view a society as a single entity that must be controlled and influenced, dividing people according to their location, race, income or other conjured demographic reasoning – thinking which always benefits an institution, never an individual.

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