Wednesday 28 December 2016

minitrue

While the year might have been vituperated with “post-truth,” the rubric and culture that are a reflection of the term is not one of propaganda machines and the memory-holes of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ministry of Truth (Minitrue in Newspeak) or even the counter-factual insistence that two plus two equals five.
If anything the rhetoric spurns authority figures and the establishment—insofar as the appeal to our vanities and fears allow—and would not suffer even a benign dictator for long out of fear that he would become an expert, dispensing a bit of knowledge and experience in addition to the justice, which was the only thing bidden or expected. It’s not that we proles are lorded over by the fictions of an eternal struggle and those interested in perpetuating it—rather, it’s us that creates the demand for disinformation and hand back a manufactured crisis for the charismatic to champion. What do you think? We didn’t liberate ourselves from them it seems—if they ever were in control—and have ceded what agency we did have to oppressors of our own making, which is a perfectly paradoxical case against facts and edification.