this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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I think it really ties back to the rigid fictions we have drilled into our heads in primary school. If you take it on faith that the system works as advertised, you just will not see it what you need to see to go, "hey, what the fuck?"
Dispelling this illusion requires breaking the basic understanding - which is some school house rock ass shit - but also breaking the more complex "adult" understandings like what is conveyed in drivel like the west wing - there are several layers of "here's how it *actually works" spoonfed to us that is as equally fictive and serving of this viewpoint as the basic shit children are taught - it's just a transformation appropriate to beguiling an adult that thinks they're figuring out how the world really works.
You need to be able to shake those up, and just doing that on an individual level is like pulling teeth and requires willingness which is a resource that only appears in select conditions - drug trips, or during trauma directly caused by the government's real nature - very little else primes anyone in the US to be even willing to see how it really is.
It fucking sucks.
In trying to be empathetic I attempt to wonder how much that propaganda would still work on me if i were subject to it daily. It was just my cheap nature that cut the cable cord initially. finding my answers to how the world actually works on my own instead of having it fed me by fiction (both tv drama and tv news) over 20 goddamn years could be the difference between who i am now and just another bobblehead.
TV is so powerful. When i see talking heads these days, it's almost a joke... they all speak so quickly, like used car salesmen... as if to pump n dump their narrative faster than the brain can think. How did i not notice this before? Did something change or was it always this way? Can i only see it now that I'm not immersed in it?
I also dropped TV, and later, because my partner needed it, I began to release myself from immersion in pop culture, and I was already a socialist - I was liberal but socialist in self-conception, and open to leftist politics before I ever left highschool - the intervening decades saw steady radicalization - but I can echo that it really accellerated in the last half decade - where i just absolutely do not, and will not, plug into "news of record" - some time away initially must've made me attentive to former blind spots, because at some point, and i can't even measure when, I suddenly saw what you mention - the pump n dump fast talking bullshitter nonsense. It didn't help that these personalities really showed their ass regularly on twitter - it became obvious in 2016 and 2020 that, to anyone paying attention, they weren't dealing honestly - and it kind of made the curtain come up on the entire media operation in the US.
I am not sure everyone invovled understands their own place and role though - some of these people are bitterly stupid, and possibly true believers - but many of them just are on the take and defending their financial interests and putting their employer's ideology before their own in the interest of climbing up the ladder - but seeing these dweebs show their ass on social media for several years really effectively undermined the illusion of authority they used to project in days when most media folk were invisible except as a name under the banner of their employers.
That's probably why there's a turning back to that - musk running everyone that's not an insane fascist off twitter is gonna end up serving that crowd even if they're not happy about it (egos are like that lol) but it's honestly a good antidote to the illusion at-large to see how dishonest these people really are, and any leftist org worth their salt should emphasize their importance by rising to the unchallenging goal of being more honest and consistent than these folks in presenting information and processing world events.
I liked the whole thing but i particularly loved your term "bitterly stupid" and imma add it to the lexicon