1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

What Would Happen If American Elites Told The Truth?

https://mises.org/wire/what-would-happen-if-american-elites-told-truth
https://techstartups.com/2021/12/18/80-us-dollars-existence-printed-january-2020-october-2021/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-releases-jfk-assassination-records-rcna61286
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934
https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/HHRG-117-GO24-20211201-SD004.pdf
https://news.yahoo.com/ap-fact-check-biden-inflates-011843623.html


What if America’s elite told the truth?

It seems a ridiculous question to ask. It’s obvious to most of us here
that our politicians, bureaucratic managers, and state-associated
business leaders hardly ever tell the truth. What use is it for us to
ask, “What if?”

There seems to be a considerable amount of social pressure urging us
to abandon our better judgment, not for the sake of reason, but for
cooperation.

If we don’t, the uncritical mob will label us “conspiracy theorists,”
placing us in a box with schizophrenics in tinfoil hats who babble on
about aliens and flat earth.

Any mature person notices the obvious discrepancy between what we see
with our own eyes and what our country’s elites tell us.

When covid-19 hit, we knew from the beginning that “fifteen days to
slow the spread” was fraudulent, yet the masses blindly expected us to
give our leaders the benefit of the doubt. When the feds churned out
as much as 80 percent of the money supply in a matter of two years and
they said inflation was merely “transitory,” we again knew better yet
were expected to remain silent.

Sure, we might not always know exactly what the truth is, but we can
generally get an idea about what it isn’t. Something is telling us
that the truth is not what the people in charge say it is.

The proper thing to do is to accept what we can’t know and home in
upon what we do. We should take what our public officials do and say
and ask ourselves, “How does this compare to what they would say and
do if they were telling the truth?” By performing this thought
experiment, we can be sure our skepticism is well guided.

When we ask ourselves this question, let’s place ourselves in the
shoes of the elite: our legislatures, judges, executives, and
bureaucrats, particularly those on the federal level. Let’s also
consider the state-sponsored business leaders, the spokespeople of the
corporate press, and established celebrities.

Let’s assume (against our strongest inclinations) we are incorrect in
thinking what they tell us is dishonest. We can even take at face
value that they are acting in good faith in everything they say and
do, intending wholeheartedly to be completely honest both in their
words and their actions.

What would they say and what would they do?
They Would Be Transparent

First of all, an honest elite would be completely transparent, and
they certainly wouldn’t silence their opponents. Why hide something if
there is nothing to hide? Wouldn’t an honest person be open to an
honest investigation? If being transparent provided an answer to us
pesky skeptics, what would be the cost?

Yet, this is not what they do. The very leaders who claim to be the
bastions of progress and virtue seem to keep plenty of secrets.

After over half a century of questions, President Biden continued to
withhold documents about the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy.

Nearly every edition of the Twitter Files exposed how public officials
intentionally colluded with a so-called private company to silence
particular narratives, some of which turned out to be likely true,
such as the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the lab-origin
theory of covid-19. Moreover, the federal government is consistently
predatory toward whistleblowers and investigative journalists like
Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
They Would Avoid Ambiguity

If they were honest, the elites would also speak as clearly as
possible. Their PR professionals would advise them to avoid all
ambiguity and maintain clear and simple language.

After all, the goal of honest communication is to deliver a message,
not to obscure it. If a subject is complicated—such as that of
economics, warfare, or virology—that is all the more reason to
simplify it.

But we know the elites don’t do this either. Perhaps there’s a reason.
In his great essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell
explains how politicians can use meaningless words to cover up their
real actions and intentions. As an example, he cites the use of the
word “democracy”:

    In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed
definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It
is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we
are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime
claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop
using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this
kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.

This sounds familiar to us. It wasn’t so long ago when scripted
corporate news anchors around the country repeated “this is extremely
dangerous to our democracy” to warn us about what they deemed to be
“disinformation.”

How many times have we heard other meaningless buzzwords—“unity,”
“equality,” “equity,” and even “patriotism”—repeated time and time
again as justifications for things like war, taxation, and mass
surveillance?
They Would Admit Their Mistakes

Though this experiment requires us to assume that our elites are never
ill willed or intentionally incorrect, we don’t have to assume they’re
always right. We can and should explore how they deal with honest
mistakes.

Of course, an honest person admits he’s wrong when he makes a mistake.
He would never ask other people to accept a contradiction by forcing
them to pretend like a mistake was never made, like the draconian
Ingsoc regime does to Winston Smith in the book 1984, another one of
Orwell’s great works.

When have the public officials who botched their response to covid-19
apologized for being wrong about “gain-of-function” research or
suggesting that the covid-19 vaccines would prevent the spread of the
disease? Did Bush or Cheney ever apologize for completely missing the
mark about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Limitations

There certainly are limitations to our experiment. Our public
officials could act irrationally. They could, at heart, be good, good
people but act out of fear of being falsely discredited.

But shouldn’t we want leaders with some degree of fortitude? Either
way, it seems they are in the wrong and it seems we’re in the right to
take what they say with a grain of salt.

The elite could also simply believe that society isn’t intelligent
enough to handle the truth, which, though perhaps false, isn’t such an
unreasonable opinion. After all, a large part of our society is stupid
enough to believe everything they say.

However, many of us are catching on. Plenty know they are being misled
but care more to avoid conflict than to point out the discrepancies.
The truth is good in its own right. Justice can’t be rooted in
falsehood.

We know that our nation’s elites aren’t acting like people who are
both honest and rational. Therefore, it’s safe to say that our public
officials are either dishonest, irrational, or both. Regardless, they
shouldn’t be blindly trusted, and anyone who tells us we are
delusional for thinking so is wrong.

Out of respect for the truth, we ought to think critically about what
our elites say and do, and we shouldn’t feel guilty at all for doing
so.