Pecking out of the shell
Strategic Culture, the only reliable source of real history, has an unusually self-reflective article.

Patrick Armstrong asks why he bothers to write the truth.

On the other side of the divide are the writers and readers of the WaPo/NYT/Economist/Guardian established media. They also generally agree with what they read, approve of each other’s writing and nod their heads in agreement. They are in their comfort zone.

Two solitudes – two bubbles. An agreeable agreement bubble for each: different bubbles to be sure but the same warm comfortable feeling of reassurance that they’re well-informed.

So what’s the point of writing? I already agree with you, you already agree with me. Our readers are here because they also agree. Writing becomes a mechanical operation, moving along a pre-determined course. No minds are changed, no minds are even engaged.

The well-informed person will be less often surprised than the poorly informed person.

Yup. I like to put it a different way, focusing on HOW-knowledge and skills:

When you know how things work, you don't need details.

Armstrong then asks how people discover alternate bubbles, how they peck their way out of the shell.

Which brings me to my final point and the answer to the question of why do we in the Strategic Culture Foundation stable and the many other new media sources do it. Why do we spend hours obsessing, researching and writing if all we’re doing is painting the inside of our bubble? It is very unlikely – we’ve all tried it and we’ve all failed – to reason the consumers of the establishment media out of their assumptions. They weren’t reasoned into their complacency and they won’t be reasoned out of it. There is little chance that some conventional believer will stumble across some piece in any alternative source and change his mind.

But people do change and our audience is growing. How can that be happening if we change no minds?

Because the individual makes the first step on his own.

How did I take that first step beyond the two fake "sides"?

I was always out of the bubble in science, thanks to a lifetime of real experience and real experiments. When your hands and eyes know how the world works (including the world of academia and grants!) you can instantly dismiss theories that disagree with the world. The "global warming" fraud was easy to debunk, and other frauds and fashions like quantum quackery follow the same pattern.

Without real experience, I was firmly locked into the bubble in politics, and I'm still not all the way out. I'm still idiotically SURPRISED when those Soros "revolutions" turn out to be Soros.

First I unplugged the TV in 2011. No knowledge can penetrate when you're tied to the Fox injector or the CNN injector.

Then I started noticing patterns in the old radio programs I'd been consuming for many years, and in the old technical books and magazines I peruse to gain material for graphics projects. Because those publications aren't explicitly political, they don't get Rectified.

Maybe the biggest shock was finding our 1918 invasion of Russia, working WITH the Axis before Armistice, in an old Signal Corps publication. Our "history" texts and media never mention this invasion. Soon other patterns emerged, such as the clampdown in 1946. Just after VJ Day we were treating the atom bomb as open-source, helping other countries to acquire it for defense. A year later the topic was forbidden. We had decided (again) to treat Russia as the enemy.

The '46 turning point was also audible in radio news and entertainment. Before '46 most news was fairly objective, openly acknowledging that all sides are propaganda. Most entertainment was empathetic, respecting the differences between classes and types of people. After '46 news was one-sided; after '54 entertainment consisted of rich NYC types squashing Deplorables.

Strategic Culture writers like Ehret had already reached these conclusions, and they have the history skills to fill in more of the reasoning and details. So I read them. They don't always hit the mark; Ehret seems to think that Trump is not just a Pied Piper; but they hit it and expand it often enough to be worth steady reading.

Labels: Alternate universe, Shared Lie, skill-estate

  ¶ 11:49 PM