This is a perfect time to talk about the issue of manufactured ignorance, of the weaponization of ignorance, deliberately using ignorance as a tool of power. In many ways this is not new, and stretches back in leapfrog manner into the reaches of history. On one hand, if you deny people information, or block them from knowledge, then you control the basis of their thinking and the decisions they will make. This is why the rise of science (and the scientific method) which put into the hands of everyone the ability to methodically discover natural truths, was such a threat to the powers of the day. This was a direct threat to the power of the Church which was the repository of all knowledge. Even who could read and write was channeled through the Church and largely confined to the aristocracy and priesthood.
The weaponization of ignorance has gotten much more sophisticated, but there has been a clear pursuit to deny access to knowledge and information over the past five decades or so. The plan has clearly been to informationally disenfranchise significant portions of the populace, shorten the attention span, disconnect them from the powers of citizenship (except as directed from time to time), and to direct their fear and hatred, their sense of disenfranchisement, at scapegoat groups rather than at those constructing this maze of deception.
After 50 or so years of intense efforts on a variety of levels, we have arrived at a place the architects could hardly imagine. An individual of the Rogue Elite, popularized through mindless “reality TV”, totally self-absorbed and self-interested, who epitomizes the goals of the architects, has become the President of the United States (with a lot of help from his friends). Trump engages in doublespeak constantly, and much of the populace flows along. He lies constantly, which should make what comes out of his mouth, and his twitter account, meaningless and moot, instead they are the darting edicts of the Idiot Emperor. His utterances are instantly the policy of the moment sending military forces across the planet, and wiping out an array of protections on a whim. We should be very alarmed that this mode of thinking and acting is modeled by a large portion of the population.
His most recent decision to generate ignorance is to bar the US Geological Survey to stop any projections of global warming effects at 2040. The selection of date is not a whim as the severity of effects goes up radically after 2040 (by most estimations). This decision impacts not just the people of the United States, but the global community as the information of the USGS is utilized by many researchers and decision-makers.
Donald Trump is amoral. He has no discernible moral code and his ends justify any means that he many choose. It is chilling that apparently the evangelical Christian community has made a similar choice to sacrifice their ethics and morals to achieve their ends – no matter the cost. This brings us to the work of John Berger, who used the term “ethicides” to capture the process that seems to be eradicating any limits or controls, and draining critical information. This is characterized in the the following quote from “The Chorus in Our Heads or Pier Paolo Pasolini” in Hold Everything Dear:
… but with ethicides – agents that kill ethics and therefore any notion of history and justice.
Particularly targeted are those of our priorities which have evolved from the human need for sharing, bequeathing, consoling, mourning and hoping. And the ethicides are sprayed day and night by the mass news media.
The ethicides are perhaps less effective, less speedy than the controllers hoped, but they have succeeded in burying and covering up the imaginative space that any central public forum represents and requires.
As Giroux specifies in the essay below (emphasis mine):
In some ways, the dictatorship of ignorance resembles what the writer John Berger calls “ethicide” and Joshua Sperling defines as “The blunting of the senses; the hollowing out of language; the erasure of connection with the past, the dead, place, the land, the soil; possibly, too, the erasure even of certain emotions, whether pity, compassion, consoling, mourning or hoping.”
We are in the midst of a battle over the minds of the people as well as whether an ethical boundaries will remain. When the ends, no matter how individually oriented, justify any means, where is the end of this? When information is shaded or withheld, and objective fact is thrown out the window, what remains? The world is transforming around us faster than I can believe, and the response (or lack there of) sends a chill down my spine.
There are a multitude of fronts that need defending and reinforcing at this point. The infrastructure, for example, is literally crumbling before our eyes. However, perhaps most critical is the crumbling to the infrastructure of our intellect, without which all else is mute for we become puppets of whatever dictator can capture the throne.
