Economics and the corporate media did exemplary service in promoting 'the Big Lies' of the financialisation crisis, most notably efficient markets theory and the trickle down theory of stuffing the rich with even greater power and wealth in the thought that some of the excess would fall on the path for the little people.
"Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."
John Kenneth Galbraith, New York Review of Books, 1982
They have tied these old canards so carefully to emotional arguments that even after the crisis and collapse, many people will still respond reflexively to anything that shakes their faith in a failed, fallen system.
One only has to verbally put a certain color shirt on a group of people's backs, and paint a different color shirt on some others, and given some prompting and rationalization, they will descend on the others with all the reckless passion and unfeeling of the school yard, even doing unspeakable things to others that they know is wrong, in the name of the expediency of
winning. Such people are easily led as they surrender their will to expediency, and a more powerful force of will.
Some years ago I remarked on a sad gathering of a knot of old school Communists in Red Square that I saw, lamenting the passing of the Soviet Union and Stalinism. There were those who had benefited from it, leading those who could not accept that the system had failed and change was coming. They huddled in the winter winds that blew across the square, their old banners fluttering, looking for someone to tell them what to do.
I see the same thing growing in the US and the UK today. But the lament is not for Communism but for the saving of crony capitalism, the heartless abuses of the oligarchy and the robber barons that have been cross branded with freedom and liberty. Their campaign is well funded and staffed with willing minds who will say or do almost anything for money. They have not yet destroyed themselves, but they are well on their way.
The gullible, like the poor, are always with us. And in tough times people often seek comfort in hardness and passionate anger. It provides a relief from thinking. And this is why there is increased polarization, as people drift to the extremes. The kind of extreme Social Darwinism that would have previously been dismissed as mental illness becomes compelling, and engages a passionate following.
"Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice...Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I also not have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiply like vermin."
"If you feed them, if you feed the children three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer?”
Its a neat trick, to make the intended victims in the middle class a party to their own victimization. Even while they think they are being
hard out of necessity, driven by the expedient and practical need to condemn those others below them to suffering, while barely realizing that they are winding the nooses around their own necks. As a particularly astute reader recently observed:
"The fortunate want to believe that their good fortune is NOT due to luck, but to their inherent goodness, their superiority to the mass of humanity. The poor deserve bad treatment because their poverty is a manifestation of their inherent 'badness' or inferiority. Thus, seeing the poor suffer, the well off feel that they deserve their privileged position.
To be kind to the poor out of a sense of common humanity or compassion would put them in the position of not being able to be proud of their 'differences.' So they seek to leave the poor to their misery and act to increase it, in order to feel better about themselves; a logic appropriate to a 5 year-old school bully."
This sounds like the gospel of prosperity, the distorted type of Calvinist determinism that is quite popular in some circles today, both on the extreme left and right. No one wants to be what they really are. And meanness and rudeness and even cruelty become an appromixation of power as the would be fortunate few slowly renounce their common humanity.
Believe what you will, but you will be held responsible for what you believe. Whom you serve you will abide, now and forever after.
Why are we bailing out the banks? part three – Lies and Opposition
By Golem XIV
October 15, 2012
At the end of part two I suggested that the mainstream justification for bailing out the banks, namely that by so doing we have provided them with the money they need in order to lead the rest of us to recovery by investing in the real economy – was what Goebbels and his boss would call The Big Lie. The banks have demonstrably and unequivocally NOT used the money they have taken from the public purse to invest in the real economy. Nor are they going to.
Why not? The reasons often offered for not lending are that there is no demand or that by not offering loans to businesses that look unsure in unsure times, they are just being prudent. And surely we want them to be prudent? These are excuses.
The reason they are not going to lend and lead a recovery is because that is not what banking is about. Helping recoveries is what governments might chose to try and do but it is not what banking is about. Banking is about making maximum profit for those who own the banks (shareholders), those to whom the banks owe money (The Bond holders) and increasingly the senior staff whose bonuses depend not on how much the bank has helped anybody, but on how much money the bank has made. And the fact of our present predicament is that the banks can make much more money, more more rapidly by playing, even deepening, this recession than they can by trying to help us out of it.
This is an unpalatable truth, so it is important that there are lies to distract from us from realizing it. Thus we have been subjected to a multi trillion dollar lie that has been repeated on every news programme and in every financial column of every newspaper for the last four years.
Goebbels and A.H. said that if you repeat a big enough lie often enough people will come to believe it. What this maxim leaves out is ‘how’ people come to believe something they once knew, or at least suspected, was a lie. Why does a big lie work better than a small one? I think the mechanism is not forgetting or the over-writing of truth with lies, but relies on escalating mental dissonance. A small lie leaves the rest of reality untouched. The unmasking of a small lie does not require any great re-adjustment of the rest of your beliefs or your grasp of reality.
A big lie, a very big lie, however, ties in to itself so much of the rest of your judgment of what is real and reliable that to question it becomes a painful mental act. It requires you pull the rug out from beneath yourself. It requires you undermine the very ground upon which you stand. That ground which you used to feel, still need to feel, is solid and firm.
To tackle a big lie can feel as if you are weakening yourself more than those you oppose. You feel the branch you are sitting on starting to weaken. Which makes it all the harder to defend what you are doing and saying against those who cast doubt not just upon what you say but upon your motives and even your sanity.
For many people the feeling of self-inflicted unease becomes too great. And the bigger the lie the greater this effect. To oppose a really big lie, particularly one vocally supported by a network of mutually re-enforcing powerful people and institutions who all claim they have your best interests at heart, is hard because of the sheer scale of what your opposition entails. To oppose the well constructed, well supported, really big lie you are faced with having to question far more than you want to.
Questioning is hard to do. It sets one apart. No one likes to be set apart.We are by instinct social animals. If we must set ourselves apart we at least want to feel confident of where we stand. The really big lie ups the ante. It forces us to feel the widening circles of disruption of our own beliefs.
One can oppose the small lie from the solid ground of the rest of your beliefs. The big lie’s strength and defense is that it forces you to question all the ground you thought was solid; the ground you thought you could stand upon to make your stand. To question the big lie is to feel that you are casting yourself out. It is not a great feeling.
Which brings me to a point I have wanted to make for a while. Why do I write this blog? Why do you come here and expose your own thoughts? Why do we do it? My answer is to ask why do families tell each other the stories of their life together. Why do people recount the events they all already know? Why? Because the act of telling and listening to what is familiar and shared is how we bind ourselves together and how we create for each other new ground upon which to stand firm. I suggest we come here to tell each other the stories which bind us together and transform us from outcasts to builders and occupiers of a new society.
In doing that we make for ourselves the things which our rulers fear most, which they wish most fervently we did not have – Clarity, Truth and from them Power.
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