Breaking the Steer

August 18th, 2017

Awake Goy

The vast majority of human beings are pretty intelligent. A tiny percentage are noticeably slower than others, and an even tinier percentage are considerably brighter than others, but the vast majority of us are about the same, intelligence-wise. So the reason that most people don’t understand how the world really works has very little to do with intelligence; it has everything to do with two well-established and powerful institutions: education, and the mainstream media.

Public education has never even pretended to teach people how their world really works. Whilst it’s quite good at explaining some of the parts of the whole, it’s never put the pieces together. It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, where you have a thousand pieces but no picture of what the finished puzzle should look like. You can study each of the individual pieces as much as you like, sometimes to a very great extent, but you have no idea what the finished picture looks like – nor even if the thousand pieces you have are all you need to have.

Our education system routinely produces “well-educated” people – youngsters with impressive examination results at various levels of achievement. Some of these people become vastly specialised and expert in some particular part of the puzzle, but for their whole lives remain totally ignorant about the other pieces – and especially how they all fit together.

The subject that education has always failed to address is the appalling cynicism of our own trusted leaders – like showing the finished picture in my jigsaw analogy. Whilst some of our leaders are also as ignorant of this fact as most of the population, a tiny percentage of them, the ones with the most power and influence, know perfectly well what they’re doing. Proof of this is difficult to come by – as secrecy is an essential part of keeping people ignorant – but every now and then a small but bright light is shone on the truth, revealing the knowing complicity of our trusted leaders, and their essential guards and lieutenants.

The missed lessons of war

Consider, for example, the words of Lloyd George, British Prime Minister during the grotesque First World War. Speaking in confidence to C.P. Scot, editor of the Manchester Guardian at the time:

If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship would not pass the truth.

Lloyd George was discussing a dinner he’d attended the previous evening where Philip Gibbs, a Times journalist, had just returned from the front and had spoken about his experience.

So here the conspiracy between trusted leaders and equally trusted news-providers to keep secret from the families of those shedding their blood the real horrors of war is openly admitted. “The correspondents don’t write and the censorship would not pass the truth.”¹

This collusion between the mainstream media and our trusted leaders, especially in wartime, is quite well-documented. From WW1 and WW2 where at first newspapers and then filmed newsreels routinely churned out mass propaganda which consisted of a mix of carefully selected truths, omissions and outright lies, through the cynical horrors of the Korean War and the Vietnam War, through the egregious lies that supported western slaughter in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq to today’s cynical killing fields in Syria, the mainstream media and our great trusted politicians have never paused in their sinister deceptions and lies.

This mountain of evidence of endless and deliberate state malfeasance is well-documented and easy to find. Yet somehow our educators miss it. Somehow generation after generation of young people are kept in the dark, and taught instead about the great so-called heroes of our past and the magnificent beneficent wisdom that guided like an invisible hand their every move. Somehow the dots are just never joined up. Somehow the picture of the finished puzzle can never be found. We have recently celebrated the centenary of the horrors of Passchendaele. We were treated to images on our TVs of the acres and acres of gravestones, the horrific Menin Gate, and our great trusted leaders looking very sad and solemn. What I never heard mentioned was that WW1 was sold at the time as being “the war to end all war”. Amongst the poems read out I didn’t hear Wilfred Owen’s superbly powerful “Dulce et decorum est”, possibly because of the words that immediately precede that famous line: “The Old Lie: dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori” (It’s sweet and proper to die for the homeland). And I never heard anyone ask these great trusted leaders why we’re still fighting wars today, why the millions of dead soldiers were lied to. This information is easily available, yet somehow our educators overlook those vital questions as they fill yet more young heads with heroic war stories.

The overlooked lessons of history

History is one of the most important subjects a young person needs to learn. Although most schools teach history, they teach a particular type of history. They teach about the greatness of a handful of kings and queens, emperors and presidents, generals and admirals. Sometimes they flit over, in a very broad sense, the billions of lives of ordinary people who had the good fortune to share their times with the dazzling heroes. Sometimes they even mention some of the suffering endured by the silent anonymous billions; but they seldom join the dots, make the connections between the obscene wealth of the glittering heroes of yesteryear and the desperate poverty of the struggling billions who provided their wealth. And they never join the even more important dots, and encourage debate about the fact that there is still obscene wealth today, and desperate poverty – and what could be done about that.

Historian Michael Parenti explains the problem perfectly:

To say that schools fail to produce an informed, critically minded, democratic citizenry is to overlook the fact that schools were never intended for that purpose. Their mission is to turn out loyal subjects who do not challenge the existing corporate-dominated social order. That the school has pretty much fulfilled its system-sustaining role is no accident. The educational system is both a purveyor of the dominant political culture and a product of it.²

School history lessons quietly indoctrinate young people into having a sense of awe and instinctive trust of their leaders. What it should teach is the exact opposite. It’s surely not through want of evidence – but they don’t; year after year new generations of children are newly brainwashed about meek obedience to their great trusted leaders. Two hundred years ago an anonymous contributor to the Mechanics Magazine observed that:

Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for then education is but the breaking of the steer to the yoke.³

It’s not as though the vitally important lessons of history are difficult to find. There are many fine books available. From EP Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, for example, to Helen Hunt Jackson Century of Dishonour, from John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, from Engels to Galeano, Parenti to Curtis the bibliography of the history that young people should be learning, – our history, real people’s history – is sizeable and compelling. Yet somehow it’s always overlooked in favour of the glittering kings and queens and dashing generals and admirals.

This is no small matter. Teaching young people to respect and admire the supposedly great institutional leaders of history leads to creating an instinctive respect and admiration for the institutional leaders of today — perpetuating the endless cycle of oppression of the 99% by the super-rich and powerful 1%.

The overlooked lessons of religion

Nothing better illustrates the miseducation of young people than the teaching of religion, which is taught in most parts of the world, to varying degrees of fanaticism.

Wherever religion is taught it’s taught as though it was some inviolable unquestionable truth. Yet there are a multitude of different religions, many of which are totally different from each other. But you cannot have explanations of something that are both true, and completely different. It’s an impossibility. Only one explanation could be right, or none of them are right, but certainly not all of them can be right.

This is obvious to anyone. Yet instead of teaching religion as a quirky oddity about human history (like Egyptian, Inca or Norse mythology, for example, which were believed by their adherents every bit as passionately as today’s Christians or Hindus believe their beliefs), particular and specific religions are selected and taught in more or less total exclusion to any other. Depending on the degree of fanaticism of the school and its teachers, the clear evidence of reality is completely ignored and the religion taught as though it was as natural a law as gravity is.

This would not particularly matter were it not for the fact that many, many wars may not have been fought, nor near so much innocent blood spilt, nor so much pointless destruction wreaked, if the warmongers had not been able to call on religion to justify the horrors they perpetrated.

Key to understanding this situation is the concept of “faith”. Faith is supposed to replace logic and rationality. Religious adherents are expected to totally trust their teachers are telling them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If inconvenient questions arise around points of dogma, the questioner must accept and believe the teacher’s explanation, no matter how irrational, or face expulsion. In the secular west this seldom matters, but in some parts of the world in can ruin lives.

At the heart of religion – any religion – lies an inescapable fact: the very existence of the god, or gods, or the existence of the heavens and hells, or paradises or nirvanas or whatever, upon which all religions are wholly constructed, cannot be proven. These mythical and fantastical beings and places cannot be proven to exist. Therefore the whole belief system is, at very best, doubtful. This is an inescapable fact. Yet most of our trusted educators do not teach it. They continue instead to teach dogma which, for thousands of years, has never yet been proved.

Some, particularly in the secular west, might think this doesn’t matter, that people don’t really believe in religion any more. But that assumption is questionable.

Take, for example, that in the US, supposedly the most advanced nation in the world, the teaching of Darwinian evolution is forbidden – because it contradicts a book whose truthful content is extremely limited.

And take for another example one of the worst conflict zones in the world — Palestine. Here we have a situation where unbelievable suffering and misery has been perpetrated for over seventy years, because the most powerful of the groups involved believe their claim to ownership of the land was bestowed by god – an entirely mythical creation whose very existence cannot be proven. Yet this ridiculous claim continues to be believed by legions of young people, and is wholly supported by the most powerful military force on the planet.

And in our largely secular western world, the most important events in most people’s everyday lives – births, deaths and marriages – we still see many people, many young people even, insisting on having some type of religious service.

This shows beyond any reasonable doubt the fact that our trusted educators are still misleading people on the still-important subject of religion.

The missed lessons of economics

Few young people are taught economics at school, at any level; yet proper management of the economy is, after providing for national security, the single most important function of government. How, if nobody learns what proper management of the economy is, can people possibly hope to understand whether their government is doing their job properly?

Where economics is taught, usually in schools reserved for the children of elite and upper middle class families, a particular type of economics is taught — known as capitalism.

Yet economics is a bit like religion. There are at least two very distinct philosophies, socialism and capitalism, which are completely different from each other. In terms of truth ownership both are equally suspect; and both demand from their adherents a type of a blind loyalty, an acceptance that their view and theirs alone is right and true, and that anything else is heresy.

Capitalism enjoys almost total global support not through any purely philosophical strengths over socialism, but because it largely tends to favour a tiny minority of super-rich people — who also control political power. Socialism, being a relatively new economic concept, has never had much of a chance to demonstrate its values, largely because capitalists, who have enjoyed absolute control of much of the planet for thousands of years, have never allowed their grip on economic power to be challenged for any length of time. Of course, there have been brave attempts to do so, going back to at least the English Civil War when the Diggers and Levellers tried to create fairer economies, but the capitalists soon overcame the upstarts — usually through extreme violence rather than proving philosophical superiority.

Even the great powerhouses of the socialist experiment, USSR and Communist China, struggled to survive from the earliest moments of their birth. Once again, these struggles were not the result of philosophical inferiority to capitalism, but because the powerful capitalist nations did everything in their considerable powers to crush them at birth. Russia, devastated more than a.ny nation except Germany and Japan in WW2, received less compensation to rebuild itself than the other major powers – even though its losses and contribution to winning the war had been greater than any other country. Communist China too, received virtually no outside support in its civil war with capitalist Nationalist China, who were strongly supported from the beginning by both the US and the USSR. Later, during the so-called “cold war”, both the USSR and Communist China were ruthlessly victimised by the powerful capitalist nations, and any country that wished to have closer ties to the communists did so on the clear understanding that they risked the combined wrath of the far richer western world.

Cuba and North Korea provide interesting lessons about the ruthlessness of capitalism. Both countries tried to establish socialist economies in the 1950s. They were immediately attacked by the US, the world’s leading exponent of capitalism, and to this day are still regarded by the world superpower as major threats to world peace — even though both are effectively impoverished third world countries as a result of more than half a century of vicious US-imposed trade sanctions. Both countries are held up to the world as examples of the failure of socialism — but the fact that they have hardly been able to trade with anyone for almost sixty and seventy years respectively is conveniently forgotten. How the US or the UK might look if they had been similarly restricted is overlooked, a question that’s almost never asked.

Steve Keen, an Australian economist who has taught capitalism for many years is refreshingly honest about economics. His book Debunking Economics is a damning indictment of his own subject, and given that he’s been teaching at university level most of his working life suggests he might know what he’s talking about.

The essential lesson that Keen points out is that the empirical evidence to support the principles of economics is too flimsy to withstand critical analysis. And whatever philosophical justification there may be is equally groundless. It turns out that economics, like religion, is wholly dependent on having faith that its principles and lessons are true:

There is one striking fact about this whole literature [of economics], and that is that there is not one single empirical fact in it.⁴

[A] frequent refrain in this book [is] that neoclassical economics is far more a belief system than it is a science.⁵

The famous Canadian economist JK Galbraith, whose considerable works preceded Keen, appears to have been of similar mind. Here he writes about the attempt to provide credibility to economics by adorning it with mathematical symbolism:

The increasingly technical formulations [of mathematics in economics] and the debate over their validity and precision provided employment for many of the thousands of economists now needed for economics instruction in universities and colleges around the world

Mathematical economics also gave to economics a professionally rewarding aspect of scientific certainty and precision, adding usefully to the prestige of academic economists in their university association with the other social sciences and the so-called hard sciences. One of the costs of these several services was, however, the removal of the subject several steps further from reality. Not all but a very large number of the mathematical exercises began (as they still do) with the words “We assume perfect competition.” In the real world perfect competition was by now leading an increasingly esoteric existence, if, indeed any existence at all, and mathematical theory was, in no slight measure, the highly sophisticated cover under which it managed to survive.⁶

And here he is quoting Thomas Balogh, an eminent Hungarian economist:

The modern history of economic theory is a tale of evasions of reality.⁷

Trying to give economics respectability by making it look like a mathematical science was a trick that was not lost on one of the best-known economists of all time – JM Keynes:

Too large a proportion of recent ‘mathematical’ economics are merely concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, and which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.⁸

Economics began life as an area of philosophy. It’s widely acknowledged parent, Adam Smith, was a professor of moral philosophy, not economics. But in its relatively short history that fact has already been disposed of. Here’s Balogh (whose book The Irrelevance of Conventional Economics preceded Keen’s similar thoughts by almost thirty years):

One of the most remarkable features of the development of economic theory over the last hundred years, and especially since the Second World War, has been the insistent craving to purge it of all political, social and moral content.⁹

These then are some of the truly important lessons about economics which our trusted educators somehow manage to overlook. Our world polarises more and more into a place where hundreds of millions struggle every day to find enough to eat whilst tiny handfuls of people wallow in more personal wealth than entire countries have at their disposal. Many scratch their heads and wonder how the economists might justify this situation. They fail to see, because educators fail to teach it, that the economic system is deliberately engineered to work this way. Contrary to capitalist teaching, there are fine alternatives, such as socialism. Choosing capitalism is just that, a choice, not a necessity. JM Keynes knew it almost a century ago when he said:

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.¹⁰

The overlooked lessons of morality

There are a multitude of components in our education system which together comprise the early stages of mass brainwashing. I have described a mere handful. Almost every subject taught in our schools could and should be analysed for how it contributes to the cause. From the mandatory requirement to attend school at all, and at specific times, to the “acceptable” standards of dress — sometimes imposed by the school, and sometimes imposed by peer-pressure. From usually trivial efforts at teaching the arts to the emphasis in the teaching of sports and games – of win-at-all-cost, rather than just having fun. Even the most important lesson of maths and the sciences is somehow overlooked for its wider implications – the discipline of using evidence-based facts to discover truth.

Then there’s the two or three-tier education system that’s common in many countries – the process whereby small children are divided according to the social status of their parents. The children of the super-rich and powerful are usually segregated from the children of the middle classes, who are often segregated from the children of those struggling to survive on the streets or crumbling tenements.

The children from privileged backgrounds are far more likely to attend universities, producing yet another illusory class distinction, as many people with university educations see themselves as brighter and more intelligent than those without college degrees. And many of those who don’t go to university see themselves as less bright, “stupid” even, when compared with college graduates.

Thus are most children indoctrinated almost from birth into their “exceptionalism” – or lack of it: children who will grow up believing and accepting their lot in life that for the most part the fortunes or misfortunes of their parents have determined.

Our entire education system needs to be scrapped and redesigned. The model we have, as Parenti correctly observed, never was intended to create an informed, critically-minded, democratic citizenry. It was intended to create masters and servants. It must be changed. Good alternative models, which can be built on, already exist. Take the inspirational Summerhill School in Suffolk, for example.

At Summerhill children have been effectively running the place for a hundred years. Children decide for themselves what lessons to take, and what classes to attend – if they feel like attending any. Nearly all decisions at the school are decided democratically by the children at weekly whole-school meetings, which are effectively run by the children. Contrary to what many adults might think, the thing works perfectly, and well-balanced well-educated children graduate from there every year.

Education can, and must, be done differently.

Part Two

The Substitute Brain

So once the young steer has been broken to the yoke, all that remains is to keep him permanently yoked. In human society this service is provided by the mainstream media who, being almost entirely controlled by the super-rich and powerful, see to it that nothing seriously conflicts with the early conditioning provided by the education system.

Comprising mainly newspapers, TV and radio news, but also the vitally important entertainment industry, the mainstream media delivers or maintains relentless 24 hour a day brainwashing. The genius of the model is that with very few exceptions the 99% are not even aware they’re being brainwashed. When you point this out, you’re generally viewed as a nutter and conspiracy theorist. Brainwashing is something only the bad guys do. Our great leaders would never stoop so low, especially against their own people.

But the evidence of brainwashing by our own great trusted leaders is abundant and compelling. Numerous books on the subject are available, and there are several great websites (such as fair.org and medialens.org) that provide hard evidence of the ongoing problem on a daily basis.

One of the earliest descriptions of modern day brainwashing by our own leaders was supplied by Arthur Ponsonby who, for a patrician member of the British aristocracy, was an unusually outspoken anti-war campaigner. His book Falsehood in Wartime, written almost a hundred years ago, cuts directly to the chase in its subtitle: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War. It’s a collection of outrageous claims made mainly in British newspapers which were blatant lies whose purpose was to inflame the passions of a nation that had no appetite for war. The key requirement was, of course, that people trusted and believed what they read in the newspapers.

British journalist Philip Knightley crafted a superb history of the institutionalised deceit of the mainstream media in his great book The First Casualty, taking its title from a quotation originally attributed to US senator Hiram Johnson who is alleged to have said in 1917, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”

Bearing in mind Johnson’s view, it’s interesting to ponder any connection to the words of Winston Churchill:

In wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.¹¹

Given that our trusted leaders have created a world of Permanent War, have they also given themselves licence to permanently lie to us?

There are other great books on the subject of modern media deceit. Chomsky and Herman’s classic, of course, Manufacturing Consent, for example, and Edwards and Cromwell’s excellent Guardians of Power. And the great journalist and filmmaker John Pilger has written and spoken many times of the subject. So the problem is not paucity of evidence, it’s the fact that evidence is kept permanently out of the mainstream. It’s one of the very clever devices used by the modern propagandist. Instead of censoring uncomfortable truths — the normal tactic of old despotic regimes — they’re simply marginalised, smeared and ridiculed. It’s a numbers game: it doesn’t really matter if a handful of cranks can see and understand the truth, so long as the vast majority do not.

Props for the illusion

There are several important methods used on a daily basis by mainstream news providers to deceive us. Two of the most important are half-truths, and headline manipulation. Although outright lies are often used too, and obviously should not be discounted, the frequency of their use is possibly not as great as the other methods.

Someone once observed that “the truth, carefully crafted is the biggest lie of all”. Telling half a truth is possibly the most common method of crafting the truth, and it’s something at which the mainstream media have become very proficient – especially by the most highly regarded and respected institutions in the establishment media – such as the BBC, for example, or The Times and Guardian newspapers.

If courtroom trials were conducted in a way that only the prosecution was allowed to present its case we would rightly conclude that justice is not being provided. If there was no mechanism to represent the case of the defendant, or to properly challenge the prosecution case, the trial would be ludicrous, a mockery, a kangaroo court. But this is effectively what our great respected mainstream media provide for us on a daily basis: the prosecution case with little or no input from the defence. Much of the prosecution case may be true, but it’s only half-true. Sometimes they will include some reference to the defence’s argument — to provide the illusion of “balance” — but only where it can be immediately discredited, smeared or refuted. This is the art of the half-truth, telling what may well be true, but carefully selecting only those bits of truth that provide a distorted version of the whole story.

Many people would say they don’t believe what newspapers tell them, that they know that newspapers lie — especially the so-called “gutter press”. Yet these papers are the biggest-selling daily news providers in the country. Although many people say they never actually read the papers, that they only buy them for the sports pages, puzzles, comics or competitions, the fact remains that many of these people usually flick through the pages, glancing quickly at the pictures and headlines. Much of the knowledge they have of world affairs is obtained from absorbing information gleaned from the handful of sensational words in bold type at the head of an article — perhaps together with a carefully selected photograph. But if we take the time to read the whole article below the headline, we often find that not a single shred of evidence is provided to justify the claims of the headline. But most people don’t read the article. The only memory they have, absorbed almost subliminally, is the invariably exaggerated, or flat-out wrong claims of the headline.

The photographs too, or the video clips that we watch on TV, provide powerful tools for truth-manipulation. Ostensibly providing visual confirmation of whatever the accompanying story is, pictures have long been misused to provide distorted “news”. Here’s Phillip Knightley, providing a fine example from a hundred and twenty years ago, used to brainwash British cinema-goers about the Boer War:

An early newsreel film shown to British audiences depicts a Red Cross tent under fire from the Boers while brave British doctors, nurses and orderlies try to treat a wounded soldier. The film was a fake, shot with actors on Hampstead heath, a suburb of London.¹²

The use of photographic and film trickery since the Boer War never stopped, of course. Today many view the old newsreel footages from WW2 and smile at the na vet of those who swallowed whole such blatant propaganda. Yet these same people unquestioningly accept the video clips from today’s battlefronts as being truthful, impartial and balanced — failing completely to join the dots from the newsreels of yesteryear with today’s coverage from trusted journalists “embedded” with “our” boys and girls on the front lines. And photographs allegedly depicting horrors perpetrated by whichever designated enemy in Ukraine, Syria or Iraq are frequently shown later to be horrors actually perpetrated by “moderate” rebels supported by “our” boys and girls. The always-excellent Media Lens, for example, provides abundant proof of this, such as this superb Alert: “Mass Media Siege: Comparing Coverage of Mosul and Aleppo”

The Brain Substitute

Having filled the eyes and ears of the 99% with the words and images that our trusted leaders want us to see and hear it only remains to properly explain and interpret that information. For that purpose our mainstream media can be relied upon to supply a seemingly endless quantity of “experts”, from university academics to ex-intelligence chiefs, from government diplomats to respected journalists, from bemedalled generals and admirals to MPs and knights of the realm; from erudite editorials in respectable newspapers to learned panel discussions on TV and radio. Any number of great trusted leaders and pillars of society can be provided on demand to instruct us on how to properly interpret the misinformation our trusted mainstream media is churning out 24/7. The case for the prosecution is always compelling, the case for the defence is all but totally eradicated.

Smoke and Mirrors

As though the collective efforts of the education system, religion, and the mainstream media are not quite enough to brainwash us thoroughly enough, there’s yet another device our controllers use — arguably to an even greater extent than all the others: the so-called entertainment industry.

It was a trick that was well known as far back as the ancient Romans. Referred to by Juvenal, for example, as “bread and circuses”, it relates to the necessity of controlled distraction, suggesting that it’s next in importance even to providing food. So long as the 99% are kept from starving, the next most important thing is to ensure their attention is diverted away from thinking about the numerous difficulties of their daily lives. To this end a limitless quantity of managed entertainment is delivered.

Although there are many fine books and films, songs and paintings, for example, that encourage deep reflection, somehow these are never the books and films, songs and paintings that are made and strongly promoted in Hollywood or the mainstream book and music publishers. It’s always the exact opposite, with the latest blockbuster film or video depicting the accepted propaganda model; or the popular music industry completely ignoring political and protest songs in favour of mind-numbing banality.

It doesn’t matter what form the distraction takes, from sports to cinema, from reading pulp fiction to attending the opera. None of it really matters providing it achieves the main aim of stopping people from wondering how to make their lives better.

Between working long and hard hours, raising families, and relaxing when possible with managed distractions, the average 99 percenter is hard-pressed to find time, or motivation, to see the world in any way differently to the way she is supposed to see it.

The Steer Well and Truly Yoked

So the education system keeps peddling the same old rubbish about great kings and queens, emperors and presidents, generals and admirals; and the priests keep peddling their mythical fantasies; and the mainstream media churn out “news” stories about today’s great leaders, seamlessly connected to yesteryear’s great leaders, together with their blockbuster movies, and musical pap distractions reinforcing the same old/same old.

Is it really any wonder that the 99% understand the world exactly the way they’re supposed to understand it?