Here is what I am getting really tired of about the online world. It is not the outright phoney narratives being driven into the heads of online mobs. It is the people who think they are fighting this, but doing it from out of their own ideology, which is usually just a different fake narrative which they have subscribed to.
If you are going to oppose fake news, fake narratives, effectively, you have to oppose it all. You cannot take a side in it, and oppose one side and support another. It is all wrong. It is all about sociopathic factions looking for influence, protecting interests.
The only ‘side’ to be on is that of the pragmatic thinker against the ideologue. To be able to do that you have to have a fully matured thinking process. You must have in your head a well worked out schemata, a model of the world, which can be tested and adjusted.
To go around with a narrative or set of narratives in your head, trying to apply them to everything, is for children and backward adults. Narrative is story telling and will invariably ignore what does not fit the story. The worst type of story telling is narrative about how people must stop using narrative, but giving them nothing else with which to understand reality.
The story teller always misses the whole picture. To build a better world than the mess we are in right now, a complete three dimensional motion picture must be formed of the world we are in, the world we need to be in, and how to move to it. That is, to build a schemata.
Once you can do that, you begin to see the full field in front of you. You see where you are and where you are going. You are not just attacking one set of narrative delusions from out of another set, usually without even realizing it is just another set of delusions.
Alas, every commentator I follow on social media, even the best, has at least one serious gap in his or her understanding. If these people could fill in each other’s gaps, we could get that full view of the field. This is what social media should do, and does not.
for example
A perfect example of what I am talking about is a certain lady I follow on twitter. She has a considerable following. She seems to be subject to that sign of being effective at attacking some establishment’s propaganda narratives; she keeps getting harassed and subjected to attempts to shut her down.
She is a very good commentator on the drive to start a world war; the way it is promoted by fake ‘left’ types of people. She is good at pointing out the thought police, and the way social media is managed so as to facilitate it. Yet she falls into a couple of very ugly fake tropes, seemingly unable to grasp where she is at.
One is that she adopts unquestioningly the assumption that the “carbon” trope is real and that the globe is actually heating up. But worse, she has this idea that measures to control the covid pandemic are conspiracies to extend corporate control and abolish civil liberties.
At least she is not hallucinating that the virus is a hoax, or it was created in a lab, and she does not outright incite people to not get vaccinated and not mask up. However, she is on this nonsense that requiring people to do these things is somehow interfering with their “rights”. The type of ass who would be indifferent to spreading life threatening disease around, belongs by “rights” in a quarantine shed or a jail cell.
I encounter many other examples of selective reality in cyberland. I used to subscribe to one individual who was very good on the history of a particular faction of the Anglo-American ruling elite. I think they would be best described as the Malthusian tradition.
These people were more to blame than any others for getting two world wars going. They are in the forefront of trying to get another one going with China and in driving this “carbon” nonsense. But the above mentioned individual only criticizes them from out of a hagiography for another, nearly as destructive oligarchic faction.
It gets really weird when another commentator I follow because he is very good at debunking the “climate” nonsense, somehow comes up with the idea that this is all a scheme from the Chinese Communist Party to convince western nations to destroy their own economies.
Pfew! The Chinese need the western economies to prosper in order for themselves to prosper. They work hard against the neo-Malthusuans who push this climate crap in order to create the economic decline which lets them eliminate competition and consolidate their control of populations.
are new forms of media the solution?
My point is that to be doing any good as a commentator, you cannot simply be aligned with an ideological faction. You must have a fully worked out and well grounded understanding of reality and of what a post oligarchic world will look like. That is what I work on.
What concerns me is whether it is possible to get an audience when you try to do that on social media. In order to pull this society out of its present downward spiral, enough people have to be able to come up with a common vision, a realistic vision, of what to move to. They have to have the whole picture of it.
The real evil behind the present deranged public discourse is not that it convinces people to accept the status quo. It prevents people from conceiving of an alternative and how to achieve it. Much of the oligarchy seems to have figured out that this is all they need to do to prevent their overthrow.
The downfall of the oligarchy is in that they cannot agree among themselves, either, as to what their ends are, as well as their being incapable of running anything. To overcome them would not be difficult if the public could rally around a single coherent vision of a post oligarchic society. Can such a coherent plan for running things rise up out of the “white noise” that the oligarchy has turned most media forms into?
I think one can safely say that this will not happen on the privately controlled media platforms. Perhaps it can develop on the new, decentralized media platforms which many people are trying to bring about. Would these platforms work to neutralize all the bad noise and allowing a sane understanding of reality to organically coalesce?
I will continue to work on such a ‘full field’, integrated understanding of reality and to find people with similar ideas. I can try to communicate my own ideas as best I can. I wait for new platforms to emerge to make this task easier and the ultimate goal achievable; a fully integrated concept of a post oligarchic society.