The Orwellian future is upon us, where slogans dominate political discourse, people with alternate views are silenced and truth no longer matters. We can see the advent of Newspeak with the government’s “Nudge Unit” and the creation of other organisations with equally Orwellian names like “The Disinformation Project”. It is all designed to break society down into small groups that can then be ‘fixed’ or ‘saved’ from their inherent ‘problems’. Social media has been the corrosive acid eating away at social cohesion of society, and all shamelessly exploited by our totalitarian masters in parliament.
Social cohesion isn’t the goal: social destruction is. Don’t believe their titles and their slogans: believe the opposite and you will see what they are really after.
In Orwell’s 1984, the society in which Winston Smith finds himself, indoctrinates people with the slogan “War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength”. The objective of this phrase is to force confusion upon the members of the Party (society). The novel is centred on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.
We are seeing the same sorts of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation in the age of Covid. We even have the Newspeak slogans. Policies that are described as ‘kindness’. Slogans like “Be Kind”, when what we are experiencing is completely unkind, like forced vaccinations.
Then there is the labelling of alternate views as disinformation or misinformation, even when those things that were labelled as conspiracy theories have actually come to pass; the time difference between a conspiracy theory and reality is now less than six months.
We have had the creation of two tiers of society and had it framed as the protection of the ‘vulnerable’ who decided or dared, even, to express freedom of choice, resulting in them being ‘othered’ and segregated from society. All of which were dressed up as being ‘for our health’.
Jonathan Haidt has written a lengthy article at the Atlantic entitled ‘Why the past 10 years of American Life have been uniquely stupid‘. The article contains so much that I’ll probably be able to write four other articles based on its ideas.
An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalised acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organisation is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side.
The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media and nongovernmental organisations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
New Zealand wasn’t in the survey but we have our own Trust in Media survey that shows pretty much the same thing. Our trust in media has been destroyed, firstly by the politicians and secondly by a lazy media that sold its very soul to the same politicians who corrupted it in the first place.
But the main corrosive actor on trust has been social media – ironically the same social media that media companies handed their audience to. There is a reason why The BFD doesn’t allow comments on Facebook: we refuse to gift our loyal and trusting readers to the evils of Facebook.
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy”.
The literature is complex – some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies – but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarisation; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
So what does our government do about this? It crawls into bed with the same social media companies and starts projects like the Christchurch Call. They claim it is about stamping out dis-information but, in reality, it is all about draconian censorship (if they can just work out how to do it properly).
Meanwhile, trust in institutions like the government and media continues to slide to oblivion. The danger is not social media; the danger is the loss of trust. But social media companies and their playthings in government and media are no longer self-aware enough to see the danger, so they double down and make things even harsher… and the cycle repeats. Trust is eroded and corroded as if dripped slowly with acid.
When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons – and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country.
The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing-down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
What is unsaid is that it is pervasive and corrosive socialism that infests education, media and social media companies. A system that has never worked anywhere, ever. Every time a socialist nation fails we are told that they didn’t do it right, if only they had implemented it properly…
Orwell’s 1984 was not about the evils of fascism: it was about the evils of socialism and communism, backed by his allegorical novel Animal Farm. Communists and Fascists use propaganda in the same way. There is little difference between them. They seek through fear and loathing to break down society so that good people will eventually do terrible things.
This has been done to us in New Zealand, where Ardern’s messages regarding vaccine mandates were turned inside out by the population – who were told the segregation of the unvaccinated was to protect them – into outright discrimination against the unvaccinated as unclean disease carriers who should be shunned and avoided.
They lied about who was actually vulnerable, said the virus was “literally finding unvaccinated people” and made people believe that if they carried a pass on their phone and jabbed poison into their arms that not only would they not get sick, but also that they wouldn’t die. Those lies came directly from the mouth of the Prime Minister.
And she has the shameless temerity of a practised liar to claim that others are creating disinformation. The data don’t lie. Vaccinated Kiwis have indeed got sick:
And they are dying:
Both fully vaccinated and boosted have had more deaths than unvaccinated. The score is 391 to 252. In the coming weeks the difference will be even more stark; yet the institutions that we no longer trust continue the pretence that the booster is your ‘best protection’ against Omicron.
We no longer trust the Labour Government or their lickspittles in the media. They’ve lied and lied and lied, incurring a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt must be paid.
What is astonishing is that they seem oblivious to the impending doom and are doing more of the same – creating a vicious and fatal cycle to trust.
When that trust dam breaks completely, they will be swept away in the awful morass of their own lies.
Then, and only then, can we begin to rebuild our nation, with the liars, grifters, fascists and rent-seekers broken on the wheel of their own making.
It’s coming. But it will be painful in the short term.
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