Post Zero

...after Post One

Hello to everyone. I originally signed up for Substack in order to comment on other people’s Stacks (forgive me if I’m getting the vocabulary wrong). But when I read US President Joseph Biden’s statement on May 8 during his interview on CNN I felt I had to say something about it, but I no longer had a blog or a Web page or a Google group (well I am theoretically in one, but haven’t written anything there in years) . Then I realized that the “Start Writing” button is there on every Substack page I read. So I decided to press it and see what happens.

I created the Substack’s title off the top of my head, but it describes quite well what I find myself realizing more and more and discussing more and more as time goes on: That the media in the imperial space no longer (if they ever did) serve the purpose of informing us. Rather, as Caitlin Johnstone never tires of reminding us, the purpose of the media - the mainstream media, at least - is to control the narrative.

It’s taken me all of a long life to realize how I myself have been manipulated by propaganda since I was able to understand a few words of English. In fact, the term “media” needs to be taken in the broadest possible sense. In a sense, the term “Mighty Wurlitzer” is better, with its image of an organ with several keyboards and a multitude of stops, of pipes able to play tunes in an endless range of registers, always finding the one tune that can cause a given individual who is a member of a given target group to dance. The tunes that are played become “earworms” - songs that we can’t get out of our heads and that influence the way we think about our own lives and our perceptions of people and places far away… the people and faraway places that narrative poems, and later books, and later radio and television, were supposed to describe to us, overcoming the limitations of our own senses.

The Mighty Wurlitzer is more than what we usually think of when we hear the term “the media.” In fact we are hearing its enchanting music from the first day we go to school, or even before then, as we listen to our parents and our playmates and their parents. Later it is our teachers and clergymen who continue to serve as conduits, like the pipes of the great organ, for the melodies we find so fascinating. Human society, of course, needs to program the individuals that make it up to participate collectively in the vital functions it serves. In the earliest societies, individuals needed to be informed of the dangers and threats it is a society’s primordial function to protect us from. Early on I was taught a concise and powerful phrase that expresses what society is supposed to provide: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But looking back at my early schooling, I now realize that I was being programmed to participate in and to enable a society driven not by fundamental human needs, nor by our collective interest, but by the needs and interests of a small minority of its members. And as I learned more about history, about literature, about language, I realized that that has been the case almost from the beginning. And I realized that consensus around those interests and the consent of all participants are as necessary for that small minority as the water is to the fish. Because the real medium of the media, the very air that drives the mighty organ, is language. And language is a collective creation, one whose function is to constantly seek, and to achieve, consensus.

What I was trying to get across in that first post has to do with how frightening it is to see what is happening not only to the media, in the broadest sense, but to our language as we continue to grant our consent to an ever-more-shadowy minority who seem to honour our fundamental human needs and instincts less and less as time goes on. I invite anyone who shares my concern to contribute to the discussion, especially by recounting the history of how they became aware that the power of society is not being wielded for the good of its members. The only rule I might presume to set down is that you argue not in the interest of any subset of humanity, but of humanity itself.