"The Truth About Politics"
by Joel Bowman
“The final cause of all great revolutions, which lies deeper than
their effective cause, is not the accretion of intolerable conditions,
but the loss of cohesion that bolstered the society’s artificial peace of mind.”
~ Robert Musil, "The Man Without Qualities", Volume I (1930)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Like rights, disasters and Hollywood faces, truth, too, generally falls into one of two broad categories: natural... and man-made. One is objective... the other subjective. One subject to reason... the other reasonably suspect. One illuminates... while the other obfuscates.Today, we focus on the latter...
Consider the following headlines, fresh off the popular presses, covering the very same event:
From CNN: "Protesters clash with federal agents outside Minneapolis hotel."
From Fox News: "Anti-ICE agitators arrested outside Minnesota hotel as police declare unlawful assembly: ‘No longer peaceful’."
And, just for fun, one from The Guardian: "‘What they’re doing is the worst of humanity’: Sundance festival stars back anti-ICE protest."
What’s the real deal? What’s “fake news”? Whose account are we to believe, if any at all? Is the truth “out there”? Is it discoverable? Will we ever really know, one way or another?
Truth and Beauty: One thing seems certain: in the age of Artificial Intelligence and human stoopidity, fact is becoming increasingly hard to discern from fiction. And to some extent, this has probably always been true. A lot depends on where you look. For some folks, truth is to be found in revelation: “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” as the Nazarene preached unto his followers. Others find it in art, such as Keats revealed in his "Ode to a Grecian Urn":
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
While still others follow it through the winding halls of philosophy, from Aristotle’s truth through logic to Locke’s truth through experience, Kant’s truth through interaction of mind and world to Hegel’s truth through dialectical process, and so on and so forth, all down the line...
But of all the myriad ways to get at “what’s real,” only an imbecile looks for “truth in politics”... and only a crackpot finds it. What matters in the shabby world of government bureaus and meddling politicians is not so much truth, per se, but the direction of those who truly believe they’ve discovered it. This group, a familiar mob on history’s stage, includes the deranged and the deluded, the crazed and the credulous and, naturally, the demagogues and ideologues leading all the bleating lambs to slaughter. And this is one reason, as we’ve noted many times before in these pages, that when it comes to being into politics, we’re mostly into being out of them.
It’s not that the subject itself is without its charm, its gauche entertainment value... or that the rogue’s gallery is without its cast of colorful villains... or that there is nothing to learn, even if only by way of cautionary tale... Politics is all that... and less!
A “strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles,” as Ambrose Bierce had it. “The last refuge of the unrefined,” agreed Oscar Wilde. As a lens through which to comprehend truth... to understand objective reality... this cracked glass offers a warped world view, to say the least.
Consider the overt political framing of a few non-trivial events from the recent past... Did Covid-19 originate from a stray bat/pangolin at a Chinese wet market... or from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same institute that received sizable gain-of-function research funding from the NIH (through Ecohealth Alliance) under Dr. Fauci’s stewardship?
Did Vladimir Putin blow up his own, multi-billion dollar pipeline, Nord Stream II, as an act of self-sabotage... or did the US government (and its NATO allies) “take out” Russia’s critical infrastructure, like Victoria Nuland and Joe Biden promised to do, as when the former president said, in February 2022, “There will be no Nord Stream 2 — we will bring an end to it,” adding “I promise you we will be able to do it.”
Are we beyond the “climactic tipping point,” fast approaching the “age of boiling,” as prophesied by Al Gore, St. Greta, Tsar Kerry and the army of Just Stop Oil catastrophists... or have climate-related deaths continued to precipitously decline, as they have done now for centuries, thanks in no small part to fossil fuel-based industrialization and the vast technological innovation it has brought forth?
[NB: It is perhaps worth noting that the decline in climate-related deaths, shown above, occurred even as the global population over the last century has grown by almost 4.4 times, or roughly 340%, from ~1.8 billion in 1920 people to ~8 billion today.]
In each of the above cases... and too many more to mention... we, the public, were fed answers in the form of “scientific consensus,” “expert opinion” and “revealed truth.” To so much as question the prevailing narrative was tantamount to proclaiming oneself a Russian asset, to hating the environment or wishing grandma into an early grave.
For reasons that ought to be obvious, few people broach these “long-forgotten,” hot-button subjects nowadays, least of all those who once thundered their certainty through legacy media megaphones, and who have since wandered, mindlessly, toward the next cause du jour, paint-by-numbers protest placard firmly in hand.
As to the ongoing protests in Minneapolis, now spreading to capital cities around the United States, the question is not whether conflicting reports are crafted to bolster political narratives on both sides, but what the deeper trends churning beneath the surface, of which these violent outbreaks are likely symptomatic, portend for the future.
One wonders, are we standing on the precipice of a great revolution? Are we, as Robert Musil wrote in his epic work almost a century ago, witnessing “the loss of cohesion that bolstered society’s artificial peace of mind”? And if so… what comes next? To be continued..."
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