This essay applies to all political issues, but the essay may be more readable if you keep one example in mind. If you don't already have one picked out, I would recommend the Military-Industrial Complex. That term was first used by Dwight Eisenhower, a general in World War 2 and 34th president of the United States, in his farewell address at the end of his second term in office. (See the video at right.) Think about these questions: What is the Military-Industrial Complex? Who is it? In what sense does it exist? How widespread is its influence? What keeps it going? Why do you hear it mentioned so seldom? To what extent is it hidden? What keeps it hidden?
Teaching with patience
Before I begin explaining the consensus trance, I want to start with a word of advice: Don't be angry at someone who persists in not seeing what you see. Their failure to see the same reality as you is probably not intentional, and your anger will be more a hindrance than a help.
Perhaps in a few cases they're simply not paying attention, in which case it might actually be helpful to shout "Hey!!! You're not listening!! Pay attention!! Wake up!!" Even in that case, your shouting doesn't need to be angry. But in most cases, inattentiveness is not the real problem, and shouting is of no help whatsoever.
Perhaps they're just stupid, but even in that case they probably don't intend to be stupid.
But it's most likely that if you're failing to communicate, the fault does not lie entirely in your audience. Any communication task really requires some effort and expertise from two parties. The listener must make an effort to understand, but also the speaker must make an effort to find some understandable way of expressing his or her ideas. That may be harder than you realize. What is obvious to one person may not be obvious to someone else. I know that point really well, because I've been a math teacher for 30 years. Any explanation rests on previous background, a shared common culture, and you cannot assume that we all have the same background, that we all start from the same assumptions.
The student is not a blank slate. The student is a maze of preconceptions, and some of them are misconceptions. To lead your student out of that maze, you must first get to know the maze; you must get to know your student. You must listen to your student's questions; you must listen to your student's ideas. Don't just politely pretend to listen; if your student is confused, then you will need to understand the shape of that confusion in order to dispel it. Thus the roles are reversed: you must learn the other person's viewpoint, in order to teach your own. It's a two-way conversation. And in the best conversations, both people learn something that neither knew at the beginning.
Reality is subjective
When Isaac Newton invented calculus and used it to explain the motion of the planets, he changed not only how we see the sky; he also changed how we see reality and truth. His discovery was one of the initial impetuses that began the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason. People believed that truth and understanding could be arrived at through observation and reason, not just from authority; this new attitude was a contributing factor in the birth of democracy.
I won't deny that observation and reason are the best tools we've got, but I would suggest that they have limitations; we may be misled if we expect them to perform with the same precision and objectivity in other subjects as they do in math and Newtonian physics. (And I've been a mathematician for half a century, so I know what I'm talking about.) Pure mathematics is difficult for most people -- perhaps because it is so different from the reality in which we all live -- and it therefore seems complicated to them. But it is actually the simplest thing in the world, because any problem in pure mathematics is finite -- it has no ingredients other than those listed by the mathematician who formulates the problem. There are no other influencing factors that could have been overlooked or omitted from mention. And yet it is unreal. Reality involves 3 apples or 3 airplanes, but the number "3" itself exists only in our imagination, i.e., in the patterns that we superimpose on the data coming in through our senses.
Amongst mathematicians there is no dissent, but that is not because some establishment has authoritarian control over the definition of mathematical truth. Rather, it is because the term "mathematics" has evolved to mean a school of thought governed by a notion of mathematical "proof," a very clear and unanimous paradigm for determining what is true and what is not known to be true. One mathematician might say to another,
Professor Jones submitted a paper to our journal last week. He had an interesting result, but he made a mistake and there was a gap in his proof, on page 7. We pointed it out to him, and he agreed that it was a mistake. He's now working to see if he can fill in that hole and save his conclusion. He thinks he probably can, but of course neither he nor we will be sure until he actually does so.
In other words, there may be occasional human errors, but there is still no room for opinion; errors, once pointed out, are readily agreed upon. Consequently, mathematics has a level of certainty greater than that achievable in any other realm of thought. For instance, the sun might not rise tomorrow morning -- who knows, perhaps all the astronomers in history have made some sort of enormous error -- but I am quite certain that 2+2 will still be 4, because it is not based on observation at all; it is based only on the same part of the mind where certainty itself comes from.
My point is that the paradigm of mathematics and the physical sciences has become so predominant in our culture that we are tempted to try to find mathematical certainty in all our conclusions about everything. But that is simply not possible yet, and it will not be for many years, if ever. In sociology, if objective truth is "what actually happens," then it is beyond our reach; the closest we can get is "what we perceive to be happening." Different people have different perceptions, different interpretations of what is going on around them. Indeed, a sociological event might go completely unnoticed by some people simply because it does not fit any pattern that they recognize.
Some of us (particularly older folks like me) may be tempted to seek that "objectivity" because, only a few years ago, we lived in a world in which there were far fewer sources of information. Consequently, many of us (at least within any one country) had similar backgrounds, and so we shared a "common culture"; we saw the world in much the same way. But today we live in an information-rich world, and people with different backgrounds have different perceptions of the world.
We interpret what we see mainly in terms of the patterns that we expect to see. Consider the photograph above, at left. Yes, it is a photograph, not just an abstract drawing of a bunch of splotches of gray. In fact, it is a photo of something familiar. But it's slightly blurry and there's no color, and most people do not immediately recognize what it is a picture of. However, once they've seen what it is — i.e., once they've identified the pattern — they are unable to stop seeing it, and they find it hard to imagine how anyone could not see what it is. Have you figured it out yet? If you've given up, you can click here for the answer.
That photograph demonstrates that our eyes merely detect raw data, not pictures. We interpret the data as pictures, but the interpretations are based on patterns that we already have in our heads. Occasionally we learn a new pattern, but mostly we see what we expect to see.
I'll mention one more optical illusion. You've probably seen this one before, but perhaps not its lesson. In the figure above, at right, most people can see both interpretations — a white vase or two black faces — but not at the same time. One interpretation of reality may exclude another, even if both are acceptable interpretations.
On some issues, different people may prefer different interpretations. For instance,
Conservatives are pessimistic about human nature; they believe that people are motivated chiefly by selfishness and fear; thus we should build more prisons, to maintain order. Change is a terrible danger, because almost anything could happen. They believe that poverty is caused by laziness. The best remedy, then, is to simply tell the poor to take personal responsibility for their lives.
Progressives are optimistic about human nature, and believe that people enjoy cooperating to work for the benefit of the community; thus we should build more schools to empower people. Change is a wonderful and hopeful possibility, because almost anything could happen. Progressives believe that poverty is caused by lack of opportunities, a flaw in society's overall economic system, and that all of society shares the responsibility for repairing the system.
(But most people are too numb to hold either viewpoint, or at most they get caught up in one issue.) Note that these two different interpretations of reality lead to different conclusions about what remedy should be taken, e.g., what government policies (if any) should be enacted to deal with the problem. Which interpretation is right? It's hard to say for sure. We cannot do controlled and repeatable experiments in sociology as readily as we can in, say, Newtonian physics. (I believe that people are motivated by love, but I know that 2+2=4.) Historians and sociologists can find patterns that fit the data they observe, but their choice of patterns — and even their choice of methods for gathering data — may be biased by their prior assumptions. At any rate, human nature is malleable and is strongly influenced by culture, so (in my own opinion) the question is not just what kind of human nature we observe around us, but what kind of humans we choose to become. (By the way, I'm a progressive, and I've written about that viewpoint extensively elsewhere on the web.)
Perhaps some degree of objectivity can be achieved in Newtonian physics, i.e., in the study of simple dead things. But for the really important and complicated questions — i.e., the lives of people — subjectivity is unavoidable.
Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States and numerous other books, has sometimes been accused of bias. Rather than deny it, he asserts that all history books are biased, and unavoidably so, though some authors and/or readers may be unaware of the biases. I would elaborate on his statement as follows: For driving, a roadmap is more useful than an aerial photograph; the whole point of a roadmap is to omit irrelevant details and focus on the details that are useful to one's purpose. But omission is even more unavoidable in a history book. The analogue of the aerial photograph would be a compendium of all the millions of known facts of the era that the historian is describing, with all the newspapers and photographs and journals and letters. In place of a single book, we would have many buildings full of books, and no one would ever have time to read the whole thing, and certainly one author could not write the whole thing. Thus, to think of "not omitting anything" from a history book is simply nonsense. But the historian must choose what to omit and what to emphasize, and these choices are determined by the historian's bias — i.e., the historian's view of what is important and what is trivial — i.e., the historian's view of what significance the various facts have. We cannot comprehend the raw data of a photograph without imposing on it some sort of interpretation; the historian must supply that interpretation. Thus, a book of history cannot help but be biased; every history book is biased. Zinn has an unusual bias, but his history books also differ from most in this respect: Unlike most historians, he is aware of his bias, and he does not try to hide it; he wears it proudly. It's right there in the title of some of his books — e.g., A People's History.
And if history books are unavoidably biased, so too must be the mainstream news (television, radio, newspapers). Their reporters may occasionally tell an outright lie, but this has become rare in the USA. It occurs more often among the "analysts" and "commentators," i.e., the people who are officially mixing news with analysis and opinions. But aside from outright lies, there may also be bias in the choice of how to present things — i.e., what pattern is superimposed upon the data. And there may be lies by omission — the news media may fail to report at all on enormously important stories and ideas. Indeed, the films Buying the War and Orwell Rolls in His Grave both document enormous omissions by the news media that were favorable to the goals of the military-industrial complex. What is the cause of this bias? For the most part, it is a worldview favorable to the corporate owners of the news media (who happen to own everything else as well, including weapons plants). Like anyone, they tend to see themselves in a favorable light, and so they believe themselves to be truthful when they share that light with all of us. Those in power wish to perpetuate the status quo, and so they seldom permit any new ideas to pass from the deviant to the legitimate sphere. This has been discussed particularly in the book and subsequent filmManufacturing Consent. Here is one revealing excerpt from the film; I added the boldface:
Jeff Greenfield of Nightline, explaining why Chomsky has never appeared on Nightline:
If you've got a 22-minute show, and a guy takes 5 minutes to warm up ... he's out. One of the reasons why Nightline has "the usual suspects" is, one of the things you have to do when you book a show is know that the person can make the point within the framework of television. And if people don't like that they should understand it is about as sensible to book somebody who will take 8 minutes to give an answer as it is to book somebody who doesn't speak English. But in the normal given flow, that's another culture bounding. We've got to have English-speaking people. We also need concision.
Chomsky's subsequent comment:
So Greenfield ... hit the nail on the head. The U.S. media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision. You've got to say things between two commercials, or in 600 words. And that's a very important fact, because the beauty of concision, you know, saying a couple of sentences between two commercials, the beauty of that is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.
So-called legitimate controversy
In his 1986 book The Uncensored War: The Media and the Vietnam, Daniel C. Hallin included the following diagram:
Ideas can be divided into three "spheres," or categories:
The middle band in Hallin's diagram contains the ideas that the mass media portrays as being matters of "legitimate controversy," i.e., questions that the mass media considers as worthy of debate — for instance, which major political party -- the Democratic or the Republican -- has a better economic plan? Unfortunately, the mass media may fail to exercise any judgment or investigative reporting at all; they may feel that truth-tellers and blatant liars deserve "equal time" and "impartial presentation." (See the Doonesbury cartoon about "situational science.") The difference between Democrats and Republicans is very sincere and real -- those two parties are at opposite ends of a box -- but neither of them can see outside that box.
The sphere of legitimate controversy corresponds closely to what is also known as the Overton Window. Joe Overton wrote that the window of political possibility may be moved leftward or rightward on the political spectrum by successful propaganda, and that any idea may go through these stages: Unthinkable, Radical, Acceptable, Sensible, Popular, Policy. More about this concept below.
The outer region of Hallin's diagram contains those ideas that the mass media portrays as ideas of "deviance." The mass media may ignore or ridicule these ideas (see Gandhi's quote), or dismiss the ideas as "unrealistic," and in some cases "overly idealistic." Examples are these questions: Should we discuss the problems that are inherent in capitalism, and the alternatives to capitalism? Are there some economic plans that are not being mentioned at all by either major political party? Falsehoods and nonsense are mixed together with suppressed truths in this sphere of ideas, and their advocates are indiscriminately labeled as crackpots or conspiracy theorists. Moreover, the different "deviant" ideas are not necessarily related to each other, and so the advocates of those ideas do not all necessarily embrace each other. None of us can know for sure which deviant realities are the true ones, so we have to work hard to try to figure that out. (Personally, my own favorite source of news analysis is Alternet.org, but sometimes I think they are not radical enough.)
Overton wrote that the way to move the window of political possibility is by pushing the edge, by advocating an extreme position, perhaps even more extreme than the one you actually want. You won't get immediate acceptance of that extreme position, but you might at least succeed in moving society's view a little bit in that direction. Continued over a long enough time, this method of advocacy may eventually effect real movement. As Stephen Colbert explained so brilliantly, if we keep calling for peace and love, at least we may actually get hope and change.
The innermost region in the Hallin diagram contains those ideas that the mass media depicts as being ideas of "consensus," i.e., ideas that hardly even need to be mentioned, because "everyone" already takes them for granted. The term "conventional wisdom" is sometimes applied to these consensus ideas, particularly in economics. An example: The word "capitalism" is hardly ever mentioned on television in the USA. It is as omnipresent, invisible, and unnoticed as the air we breathe, and certainly there is no questioning of its basic assumptions, no discussion of its horrific side effects.
One of my favorite examples was pointed out by Naomi Klein in an interview shortly after her book, The Shock Doctrine, was published. The book was discussed widely in the European press, but hardly noted at all in the USA.
In most parts of the world, it's easier to even identify the radical policies of capitalism as contested territory, as something to debate. Whereas in the United States, these policies are the air we breathe; they are invisible almost because they are so hegemonic.
The Hallin diagram was brought to my attention when Jay Rosen discussed it in an essay, and then Glen Greenwald interviewed him about it. Rosen made several interesting points. The borders between the three spheres are not rigid and fixed; they may change as time passes. They can change for a number of reasons; most of all, an idea moves from the outermost sphere into the controversy sphere if enough people insist enough times on talking about it. A politician can show leadership by taking on an issue that is not already popular with the press; for instance, Al Gore moved the issue of global warming all the way from deviant to consensus, almost single-handedly. But politicians rarely exhibit such leadership; more often they take the safer course of sticking only to issues that are already classified as "legitimate."
The press (newspapers, radio, television) has exercised a near-monopoly of control over the three spheres, because we all had to listen to them. And yet, they are not conscious of this process; the press is not familiar with the Hallin diagram. In other words, the Hallin diagram and the other concepts on this page are themselves ideas in the deviant sphere. In recent years, they have begun to lose their monopoly: through the internet, we have begun to listen to each other (see the "peer-to-peer" diagram). We may be able to accelerate that process by discussing that very notion amongst ourselves and moving the Hallin diagram into the sphere of legitimate controversy. In other words, it may become easier for us to get some public attention given to questions like
How does the Military-Industrial Complex function?
after we have increased the attention given to questions like
What determines which questions get public attention?
How can we ordinary citizens, people who are not famous, expand the sphere of legitimate controversy? That is the question that has been torturing me more and more, of late. The strategy that seems most viable to me is this: Pick one (or a few, but very few) concepts, and repeat them whenever you can, wherever you can -- in protest marches, in letters to the editor, in blogs, in songs, whatever. Try to get other people to join you in this. Resist the temptation to devote yourself equally to every issue under the sun, for there are too many deserving issues, too many wrongs crying out to be righted (war, racism, poverty, global warming, pollution, excessive incarceration, labor exploitation, inhumane schools, domestic violence, rape, child abuse, animal abuse, etc., etc.).
However, I don't think it's necessary that the one or two concepts that you're trying to convey must be concrete; I think they could be abstract concepts. And thus it might be possible to push one concept that includes many other concepts, if you can package it in a simple enough form. Personally, the two abstract concepts that I've been pushing of late are empathy and the awareness of the defects of unregulated capitalism; you can see both of those concepts promoted in this recent essay of mine.
Denial and dissociation
The mainstream media deny us access to the so-called "deviant sphere" of ideas, but to some degree we acquiesce in that denial; we are reluctant to awaken. This has been noted particularly by people in the peak oil awareness movement; they call it the consensus trance. I first heard that term when I saw the video Oil, Smoke, and Mirrors. That film begins with Richard Heinberg saying:
It's so easy to go into denial about peak oil, because it changes everything. Every one of us has grown up during this unique historical period when we've had easy access to cheap energy and all of the things that cheap energy can do for us. And so even people who intellectually understand peak oil, as soon as they turn their attention away, almost immediately start to go into their normal mode of thinking. It's a natural human response. I find myself doing it all the time, and you know I spend hours every day studying peak oil from all sorts of different standpoints. As soon as I turn my attention away, suddenly I'm in the "normal world" again, the so-called "normal world," the consensus trance that we all live in on a daily basis.
Clinical psychologist Kathy McMahon has also given some insight into this repression phenomenon, in one of her blogs:
Emotionally, I could not entirely embrace my convictions, because it would have set me too far at a distance from those around me. These events, outlined by the "heretics" years ago, were labeled as "absurd," "paranoid" or "crazy thinking." Now, they are accepted as givens, an "obvious" conclusion to a "clearly destructive" set of events that "anyone could see coming."
... The fear of social ostracism is so great, we become alienated from ourselves to keep our sense of "belonging." Yet, throughout it all, (just as with Erickson’s self-inflicting subjects) the pervasive levels of stress, depression, anxiety, worry, insomnia, or free-floating rage, remind us that something’s wrong.
... A whole host of what psychologists call "defense mechanisms" help maintain this trance, by warding off alternative views. And, as quickly as these ideas were once rejected, this alternative view becomes the accepted reality, as if it was "forever thus."
In her critique of capitalism, Power and Powerlessness, physician Susan Rosenthal discusses how the working classes are abused by the plutocracy but are reluctant to see this abuse:
The willingness to trust is bolstered by the desire to avoid the pain of betrayal. The American public had the option of believing the president or feeling massively betrayed, so they gave him the benefit of the doubt. ....
In relationships where one person is more powerful and the other is less powerful, and there seems to be no alternative to this arrangement, the less powerful person will protect the connection with the more powerful person, even when that person cannot be trusted. This phenomenon is called the Stockholm Syndrome after a 1973 bank robbery in Sweden where hostages defended their captors. The same phenomenon can be seen in maltreated children who defend the adults who hurt them. These children will “forget” the abuse, forgive the abuser, and blame themselves instead. Battered adults who cannot escape will also make excuses for their abusers and blame themselves. There is some logic to this. As long as people feel powerless, it feels safer to trust the people with power. A captive who turns against a captor, a child who turns against an abusive parent, and a battered spouse who turns against the batterer all risk greater harm and possible death.
The more dependent we feel on our rulers, the more willing we are to reject evidence that discredits them, no matter how convincing it is. When authorities reassure us that their greatest concern is our well being, we long to believe them. No matter how often they swindle us, we look for signs that they are right and we are wrong. We forgive them again and again. Our "amnesia" flows from the mistaken belief that submission is the only option.
Evidence is easily dismissed, particularly if it is not seen at first-hand. People can think "that's a lie," or at the very least, "they must be mistaken" or "oh, I haven't understood this properly." Thus people are inclined to believe what they want to believe; that outweighs evidence. And most of us are reluctant to believe that we, and everyone around us, are victims of a mass deception; that notion is so preposterous, or so horrific, that we do not wish to consider it, and so our reluctance generally will trump any evidence. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who had something dirty on everyone in Washington, said
The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.
David Ray Griffin (also on audio) and John B. Cobb, Jr. suggest that mainstream media will not consider evidence that the attacks of 9/11 may have been an inside job, because such an assertion is to heretical even to deserve examination. It is heresy against the "nationalist faith" -- e.g., the belief that America's leaders never deliberately do anything truly evil.
In excluding the Jews from participation in the Medieval discussion, Christians required an understanding of how the Jews had gone wrong and rejected their Messiah. Once they understood this, they "knew" that any arguments provided by Jews were mere "rationalizations." There was no need to examine their credentials as scholars or the quality of their reasoning.
In excluding 9/11 truth seekers from the contemporary discussion, the nature of "conspiracy theorists" must be similarly explained. We are nuts and cranks who refuse to recognize and accept the obvious truth, and who are psychologically impelled to develop complex and convoluted accounts, based on hatred and on fevered imagination, to replace it. Since no one has infinite time available for investigating everything, one should not waste time and effort on the "rationalizations" of "conspiracy theorists. It is enough to label and dismiss us.
We are being deceived, probably in many ways, by many people. It is unclear whether those many people are in one organization or several; it is unclear whether they are all collaborating in their deceptions. And they have people cooperating with them, but not all the people cooperating are in on the deception; some are fooled by it and are simply going along with it because they believe they are reacting in the best way to what they perceive as reality. And perhaps it's not all one or the other, foolers or fooled: Some people may be in some intermediate, partially self-deceptive, ambiguous position of doublethink, as Orwell suggested in his novel 1984 (though I have to admit I don't fully understand how that works). In fact, to some degree our entire nation is engaged in doublethink -- see the two signs in the photo at right. And the deceivers vary in their motivations -- some are acting out of greed; some believe they are protecting their country; etc.
I don't know whether it is possible to discern which people are foolers and which are fooled, nor which people are motivated by selfish interests and which are motivated by some misguided, twisted altruism. Nevertheless, I have a feeling that it is useful to think about such distinctions. I think it gives us a slightly clearer perspective about the whole nature of the deceptions.
We have a difficult road ahead of us. I think that the closest thing to sanity that most of us can manage today is a sort of split personality: We must live in the mass media reality in order to get our paycheck and buy our groceries; and yet at the same time we must live in a deviant reality, in order to try to see more clearly and build a better future.
Personally, a few years from now I hope to move into a commune of like-minded people, so that my daily acquaintances will live in the same reality that I do; but that will not end my internet connection to the madness that haunts the world. I will continue to try, in my own fashion, to fight the good fight.
Updated paranoia scale
My original, Bush-era paranoia scale can still be found at this link. I think it probably was funnier than the new version. I have a very different, entirely new (June 2009) version below. I intended the term "paranoia" with two different meanings: From the outside, it is a mental defect, a kind of craziness; but from the inside, it is a kind of awareness and enlightenment.
Different people are at different stages in their awakening. If you treat it as an all-or-nothing process — if you tell someone "everything you have ever believed is wrong" — then they may simply dismiss you as a crackpot. You might find it more productive to tell them just a little of what they haven't learned yet — try to guess how much they're ready to hear, and don't go beyond that. (Or I could be wrong; maybe telling them everything is a better strategy. I don't really know. Do you?)
At first, I was inclined to peg one's degree of paranoia to one's beliefs about certain issues, or perhaps simply to a count of how many things you believe that are outside the sphere of legitimate controversy (discussed earlier in this essay); see illustration at right. But I've decided to take a different direction, and measure how gloomy your worldview is, how sinister you believe your opponents are -- i.e., how much do you think their intentions to you are unkindly. (Some of this material is explained in greater detail near the end of my essay about progressives versus conservatives.) I need to revise this some more, to make it funnier -- I need to add theme songs, bumper stickers, etc. Also, some people might put these steps in a different order.
LEVEL WHITE: Experts agree, everything is fine. Don't wake me, I'm enjoying my nap. The people who run our society are trustworthy, well-intentioned, honest individuals, and their disgreements are minor and are settled through public debates. The war is going well and soon will be over, and then democracy and freedom will be enjoyed everywhere. The Disney Channel shows the wonderful world in which most of us live. I don't bother with the news. I'm a soccer-mom with Prada and I-phone. The bumper sticker on my SUV says "Eat less, and exercise." Suggested song for this level: "Don't Worry, Be Happy," by Bobby McFerrin. (This song was used in George H. W. Bush'scampaign in the 1988 U.S. presidential election, until McFerrin objected.)
LEVEL BLUE: Leave it to us, we know what's best for you. The people who run our society are well-intentioned, but a bit arrogant; they are elistists. They think that they know what is best for us, and so they don't want to bother us with the details, and they'd rather that we didn't keep looking over their shoulders and jogging their elbows.
LEVEL GREEN: Even if it hurts, it's for your own good. The elitism (a sort of misguided altruism) is carried a bit further. The people who run our society are so completely convinced of their own rightness, that they do not feel it is necessary to be honest about what they're doing. After all, the end justifies the means. Moreover, there are competing factions among the elite class, and one faction will use deceit to win out over another faction, since each faction is quite sure that it's the one with the correct vision of what is good and true and beautiful.
LEVEL YELLOW: In order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy the village. That statement, or one much like it, was made by a major in the US army after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre, in the Vietnam War. It is elitism carried to a logical extreme.
LEVEL ORANGE: We want it all (and perhaps we deserve it all, too). The rich and powerful in society are colluding to make themselves more rich and powerful, perhaps at everyone else's expense. There are a number of different possible justifications they might give for this:
Elitism carried further. If we control all of society's resources, then we can do what is best for society.
Market fundamentalism. Entrepreneurs are the fount of all wealth; the fact that they have garnered wealth proves their industriousness and their wisdom. They should be encouraged; thus the wealthy should be rewarded with more wealth. The only effective way to lift all boats is by trickle-down.
Authoritarianism as a natural order. The stronger are more deserving.
Simple greed. We wants it because we wants it.
Note: Even at this level, it is not necessary for the collusion of the rich and powerful to be a secret cabal. It may be simply that rich people tend to believe in a philosophy that is good for rich people, and they all adhere to that philosophy even without discussing it behind closed doors. It's true that the original Powell Memorandum of 1971 was written in secret, but adherence to it is quite open.
LEVEL RED: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength. The villains in the novel 1984 are not concerned with justifying their lust for power; they simply and unabashedly lust for power. Moreover, though wealth plays a role in the wielding of power, it is not the main ingredient. Power means control over other people's lives. The cabal that rules a country may intentionally bankrupt that country, in order to keep its people weak and tired and unable to organize and rebel. They may engage in perpetual war, as a means of keeping their own country from affluence. And obedience is not enough, because people who follow your orders might actually be in agreement with those orders. The only true measure of power over other people is the ability to make them suffer -- e.g., torture, which gives no reliable information.
LEVEL BLACK: The antichrist is afoot. The evils that confront us are not merely human, but cosmic. At stake is not just our freedom, but our very soul. And reason cannot be trusted, because the antichrist is the supreme liar; he can disguise himself as our savior.
FAQ (frequently asked questions)
Which color level are you (the author of this web page) on? All of them. As I explained earlier on this page, split personality is the only way to be sane nowadays.
Why doesn't your color scale mention Ron Paul? Okay, I'm mentioning him now. I agree with RP about peace and about the Federal Reserve, but I disagree very very strongly with his plan to deregulate the corporations. I've written about that extensively elsewhere. Hey, I'm entitled to my opinions.
Who I'd like to meet: Anyone who wants to make the world a better place, who feels that we're all in this together, who believes in questioning authority, and who doesn't believe that the end justifies the means.
Waking from the consensus trance's Friend Space (Top 39)
Thank U for joining! Now U can contribute whit any thing that made the walk towards World Peace. We can make this group the most famous group in the whole wide world. Remember it is all up to us if it shall happen anything at all.
PEACE FULL SAIL PEACE FULL SAIL The excitement grows! We are getting closer to showing the world our desire for World Peace. We have sent Lemmy with a truckload of supplies from Germany to Spain to load on the boat. Also, several musicians are heading that way as well as the Skipper! I leave in a few days to set up the Satellite equipment for our Internet broadcasts, brief the crew and discuss how we are going to film the journey. We are looking good with a major network for our series and I should be talking with them again soon. They don't know it yet since there is some new news, but we are joining forces with another documentary being filmed in Jamaica by a huge music-film-publishing company that I'm affilliated with. We are going to surprise alot of people! This will make our production 100 times fatter! and our mission a million times brighter! Wait till you hear who's involved with that! Also in discussion is our daily updates we are filming to upload on to the Internet via the satallite equipment. Thats a little tedious but should be no problem for the Peace Full Sail EuroRock experts! When we arrive at the boat we will also begin shopping for two months worth of food for 10 people. Can you imagine that? Det was telling me three to four carloads of rice, beans, pasta, ...basically all the stapels. Bottled water is enormous! Everyone will then do another shopping spree for their 'cant do withouts'..like chocolates, chips, you know, the junk foods I guess. Maybe some healthy stuff lol...I can't live without my Sugar Smacks, Chocolates and potato chips...the rippled ones. We will also be training the crew on safety, running the sails, watches, and general stuff like how to shower with sea water and sweet water rinse. Also the proper way to hollar, "Ahoy Mate!" Many things we gotta do!..we will upload some video of us doing all the above before we set sail. I will also make public our EuroRockers and award winning film crew at t
Washington Transcripts (What is really being said in DC)
This World Health Organization report, the one that calculates 223,000 Iraqi civilians killed since we invaded, is outrageous! Of course, we don’t give estimates of civilian deaths, but our President he figures 30,000. President Bush keeps track. He personally regrets even this small loss of life. He counts. He is a compassionate conservative leader. Now go forth and let his compassion shine forth. Good spin. Good spin. Damn good spin!
From DivertingBuddha’s blog, the space all about Washington political hacks betraying democracy!
Extreme chaos and destruction from global warming, a looming peak oil crisis threatening economic collapse, or a national security nightmare brought on by an overdependence on foreign oil. You choose the reason... the time to ACT is NOW!
"We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. -Edward M. Forster
Washington Transcripts (What is really being said in DC)
You don't have money to fund the war or children, but you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement.
From DivertingBuddha’s blog, a space all about Washington political hacks betraying democracy!
This page is in direct response to the nonsense of "The Secret" that seems to be deluding some individuals in this country.
This concept takes the power of positive thinking to a higher level telling you "This is The Secret to everything - the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted."
Some people have seen their loved ones go out on shopping sprees because, "The checks are just going to start coming in the mail!!!" They won't tell you who from.
Some of these people won't go to the doctor, because all they have to do is "Think themselves healthy." If I were an amputee, could I THINK myself a new arm? or leg? Hell, even a finger? NO. If I have lost teeth, can I THINK them back into existence? NO.
Look, a positive attitude is great. Even having a daily mantra is good. Focusing on your goals is a wonderful idea. But believing that you attract good or bad things to you based on what you are THINKING??? What about a child who is miscarried? Did they die because of their negative thinking?
But it's most likely that if you're failing to communicate, the fault does not lie entirely in your audience. Any communication task really requires some effort and expertise from two parties. The listener must make an effort to understand, but also the speaker must make an effort to find some understandable way of expressing his or her ideas. That may be harder than you realize. What is obvious to one person may not be obvious to someone else. I know that point really well, because I've been a math teacher for 30 years. Any explanation rests on previous background, a shared common culture, and you cannot assume that we all have the same background, that we all start from the same assumptions.
My point is that the paradigm of mathematics and the physical sciences has become so predominant in our culture that we are tempted to try to find mathematical certainty in all our conclusions about everything. But that is simply not possible yet, and it will not be for many years, if ever. In sociology, if objective truth is "what actually happens," then it is beyond our reach; the closest we can get is "what we perceive to be happening." Different people have different perceptions, different interpretations of what is going on around them. Indeed, a sociological event might go completely unnoticed by some people simply because it does not fit any pattern that they recognize.
We interpret what we see mainly in terms of the patterns that we expect to see. Consider the photograph above, at left. Yes, it is a photograph, not just an abstract drawing of a bunch of splotches of gray. In fact, it is a photo of something familiar. But it's slightly blurry and there's no color, and most people do not immediately recognize what it is a picture of. However, once they've seen what it is — i.e., once they've identified the pattern — they are unable to stop seeing it, and they find it hard to imagine how anyone could not see what it is. Have you figured it out yet? If you've given up, you can 
Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States and numerous other books, has sometimes been accused of bias. Rather than deny it, he asserts that all history books are biased, and unavoidably so, though some authors and/or readers may be unaware of the biases. I would elaborate on his statement as follows: For driving, a roadmap is more useful than an aerial photograph; the whole point of a roadmap is to omit irrelevant details and focus on the details that are useful to one's purpose. But omission is even more unavoidable in a history book. The analogue of the aerial photograph would be a compendium of all the millions of known facts of the era that the historian is describing, with all the newspapers and photographs and journals and letters. In place of a single book, we would have many buildings full of books, and no one would ever have time to read the whole thing, and certainly one author could not write the whole thing. Thus, to think of "not omitting anything" from a history book is simply nonsense. But the historian must choose what to omit and what to emphasize, and these choices are determined by the historian's bias — i.e., the historian's view of what is important and what is trivial — i.e., the historian's view of what significance the various facts have. We cannot comprehend the raw data of a photograph without imposing on it some sort of interpretation; the historian must supply that interpretation. Thus, a book of history cannot help but be biased; every history book is biased. Zinn has an unusual bias, but his history books also differ from most in this respect: Unlike most historians, he is aware of his bias, and he does not try to hide it; he wears it proudly. It's right there in the title of some of his books — e.g., A People's History. 
And if history books are unavoidably biased, so too must be the mainstream news (television, radio, newspapers). Their reporters may occasionally tell an outright lie, but this has become rare in the USA. It occurs more often among the "analysts" and "commentators," i.e., the people who are officially mixing news with analysis and opinions. But aside from outright lies, there may also be bias in the choice of how to present things — i.e., what pattern is superimposed upon the data. And there may be lies by omission — the news media may fail to report at all on enormously important stories and ideas. Indeed, the films 
So Greenfield ... hit the nail on the head. The U.S. media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision. You've got to say things between two commercials, or in 600 words. And that's a very important fact, because the beauty of concision, you know, saying a couple of sentences between two commercials, the beauty of that is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.
The middle band in Hallin's diagram contains the ideas that the mass media portrays as being matters of "legitimate controversy," i.e., questions that the mass media considers as worthy of debate — for instance, which major political party -- the Democratic or the Republican -- has a better economic plan? Unfortunately, the mass media may fail to exercise any judgment or investigative reporting at all; they may feel that truth-tellers and blatant liars deserve "equal time" and "impartial presentation." (See the Doonesbury cartoon about "situational science.") The difference between Democrats and Republicans is very sincere and real -- those two parties are at opposite ends of a box -- but neither of them can see outside that box.
The outer region of Hallin's diagram contains those ideas that the mass media portrays as ideas of "deviance." The mass media may ignore or ridicule these ideas (see Gandhi's quote), or dismiss the ideas as "unrealistic," and in some cases "overly idealistic." Examples are these questions: Should we discuss the problems that are inherent in capitalism, and the alternatives to capitalism? Are there some economic plans that are not being mentioned at all by either major political party? Falsehoods and nonsense are mixed together with suppressed truths in this sphere of ideas, and their advocates are indiscriminately labeled as crackpots or conspiracy theorists. Moreover, the different "deviant" ideas are not necessarily related to each other, and so the advocates of those ideas do not all necessarily embrace each other. None of us can know for sure which deviant realities are the true ones, so we have to work hard to try to figure that out. (Personally, my own favorite source of news analysis is 
A politician can show leadership by taking on an issue that is not already popular with the press; for instance, Al Gore moved the issue of global warming all the way from deviant to consensus, almost single-handedly. But politicians rarely exhibit such leadership; more often they take the safer course of sticking only to issues that are already classified as "legitimate."
And perhaps it's not all one or the other, foolers or fooled: Some people may be in some intermediate, partially self-deceptive, ambiguous position of 
My original, Bush-era paranoia scale can still be found at 
You might find it more productive to tell them just a little of what they haven't learned yet — try to guess how much they're ready to hear, and don't go beyond that. (Or I could be wrong; maybe telling them everything is a better strategy. I don't really know. Do you?)
