“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth” Garry Kasparov
A revisiting to explain more why I spend time talking about propaganda and personal sovereignty in connection to Sustainability. Years ago, when I was an adolescent being educated in Physics, Math, Engineering drawing, Biology and Chemistry I never questioned the facts as they were taught. In Art, Geography, History and General Studies (philosophy), facts were more fluid but there always seemed to be an acceptable answer that was preferred, especially if one wanted to pass an exam. At 16 I did question the religious doctrines that a cleric tried to impose on me because I saw the contradictions within the bible as untenable for me, but as a budding engineer-scientists, facts were facts; or so I naively believed. At 14, the school hierarchy decided that I was destined to be an engineer and so at age 16, I stopped taking biology because the biology class schedule conflicted with my math and physics classes. When 4 years later I came back to do a biology degree after four years of advanced math, physics, and engineering qualifications, I found biology had changed substantially. The basic never not to be questioned core dogmas were the same (e.g., evolution, taxonomy, Germ Theory, Physiology, basic biology/ecology) but everything else had transformed as new technology opened up the potential of what was now observable within the natural world. It still is, but despite evidence showing otherwise, many of central biology dogmas persist like faith-based doctrines.
After high school, I began working in a university biochemistry teaching lab, setting up lab preps to demonstrate facts to students. Soon I moved to the research wing helping professors as a research assistant. I did my degree and masters level studies part-time and so got the student ‘fact’ preps in college while at the same time in my research job learned how uncertain all these facts actually were. After I moved to the USA and became a research associate, I worked at a medical school and my admiration of medical doctors took a slight hit when I realized how much they were not taught in their intensive two years of studies before being released into their clinical internships. It was at this time that I became aware of my first crack in the scientific dogma. These medical students had to remember so much to pass their medical doctor board exams that any extra information that would give them greater understanding was usually dismissed. I know that my traditionally educated wife (Human Genetics Ph.D.), who was teaching metabolic biochemistry and genetics at the school, always tried to give a more comprehensive overview rather than just facts to be memorized. It discouraged her when so many students complained that since these facts were unlikely to be asked on the board exams, she not cover them. They especially didn’t want to hear about nutrition and innate genetic protection to disease.
Like most people I grew up believing that allopathic medicine was the only way to treat health problems – it was the only way that the British NHS practiced medicine and so I hadn’t been much exposed to osteopathic medicine except as eastern quackery in the media. (Allopathic medicine refers to a system in which medical doctors and other healthcare professionals (such as nurses, pharmacists, and therapists) treat symptoms and diseases using drugs, radiation, or surgery.) Like most people visiting an M.D., I always felt like a symptom and never a patient, no matter how qualified and pleasant the M.D. was. Like most kids, I had some childhood health problems and was used to that way of being treated. After the medical school experiences, I did a deep dive into osteopathic medicine to realize that the main difference was in how the two looked at a patient – symptom (a pill for every ill) or whole person (nutrition and metabolic balance). The other main difference was that allopath’s immediately focused only on drugs, drug treatments, and surgery. Osteopaths began by looking at the whole person, their environment, and the balance metabolic systems within the body. While allopath’s talked about healthy diets and exercise, they relied on the food triangle (nutritional guidelines) of how much fat, carbohydrate, and protein intake was needed for a healthy diet, and that was another rabbit hole I fell into.
I’ve always been fascinated by mysteries and unusual phenomena, and despite the heavy science and engineering that I was steered into, I still read a lot of work about socio-cultural research (e.g., anthropology, archaeology), geography, history, macroeconomics, and ‘science’ that still remains on the edge of acceptance within the mainstream world of academia. I am highly skeptical, but always willing to listen and discuss anything. After recognizing the limitations of traditional medical doctors and seeing major flaws within the nutrition guidelines, my belief systems were taking a hit and I sought to understand more about medicine and nutrition that lay outside the boundaries of mainstream acceptance. In a nutshell, it all boils down to ‘follow the money.’ I saw the propaganda being driven by mainstream media and our educational systems. It wasn’t Soviet or Nazi level propaganda, but it was as effective and insidious in how whole populations within the world were all being brainwashed by the corporate world. This started escalating rapidly with the rise of globalization in the 1980s. “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state” Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
Environmentalism has always been a fight between activists and the corporate sector. To study environmentalism is to see raw corporate propaganda at its finest. I had recognized this early on and then after seeing it in medicine and nutrition, I started to see it everywhere, and all the time. It’s like looking at a puzzle and not seeing the answer. Once you do see it, it’s hard to unsee. When I started my later graduate studies in the USA, I studied sustainability and saw that people all over the world, both in the developed and undeveloped world (there’s so much within a term, so, pick whatever terms fit your frame) were getting the same propaganda and so gaining the consumer worldview through globalization, whether they chose it or not. Indeed, I would argue (it’s complex) that most of the violence in the world during the past five centuries is trackable back to corporate interests and their historical drive for profit without any regard for people.
So, hopefully you see where I’m coming from and where I am going. Propaganda now rules our world and those that are true believers are as dangerous as the ones promulgating the untruths, we take for granted as our global objective reality. “Propaganda … serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda” Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. A lot of the facts you hold dear as your cherished beliefs may not be so. In my communications class I began the class by asking my students to give me a fact, and to each given I offered another perspective of that fact to show how all facts are contextual. That is, they are framed within a given set of understandings and assumptions that we never discuss (unless you are in a philosophy class😊). And the hierarchies have controlled curricula and pubic narratives to have us believe the authorities that give us these facts. It’s all part of the conditioning I always talk about. Our reality is framed by the narratives we believe and if we let our narratives be controlled by propaganda, we are but sheep being led around a paddock before the truck carries us to the slaughter house.
To Be Continued ……………
0 Comments