One requires a Magic Decoder Ring to make sense of things in our present. Though it is true that The Media (the legacy media), because they are corporations which are in turn owned and managed by other corporations and these
constellations of corporations are, essentially, the entities that own things, run things, determine things in a macro-economic sense -- how could one realistically expect that these corporate newsrooms, and their employees, could come out against the interests of those who control the mechanisms of information distribution?
We are dealing here, let's say, with the
Telescreen of our modernity.
It makes me feel depressed that I am going to use the word
mystification here, given the Marxist usage, but should we not establish, as a primary statement and perception, that we cannot really & truly trust
any information that is purveyed to us in this time of profound ideological confusion, discord, hypocrisy and mendaciousness? If there is a Key I propose it is this: that behind all formation of opinion, and those presentations of perspectives that we encounter in the Mainstream, if we do not see & realize that larger, more powerful interests operate constantly in the background, which have all the good reasons to keep us (again forgive me)
mystified -- if that is not our base position, our primary commitment, then we are willing participants in our own self-deception.
And this is where, I think, Ibn Wilbur al-Boneman has a point. He said:
The point I have been making is that information can be interpreted in different ways.
But the more difficult issue, the more insidious issue, has to do with the *interests* of those who fashion the pictures we are forced to stare at.
There is a discipline called Media Studies that dedicates itself to the examination of Media Systems from *a certain distance*. My impression has been that of those in this field whose works I have examined they are very much on the left-leaning political perspective. Now why is that? Why is it that the political Left has traditionally taken upon itself the task of *unmasking* and exposing the power-concentrations that create and purvey the images and ideas? My best guess is because of the technique of critical analysis that developed through the application of a Marxian analytical viewpoint.
Oddly, in our present, it is the hybridized political Right that attempts to use these analytical tools against what is understood to be a generally Left-Progressive Establishment. Consider how unreally weird it is that, today, America's political Right lashes out at the FBI and the federal police nexus, when just a few decades back it was the radical political Left that attempted to expose the FBI's wars against the Black liberation movement (Black Panthers and others) as well as the American Indian Movement. I say *hybridized* (and borrow Iwannaplato's term) because it has now become very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to discern the Left from the Right in many ways. The Left has become allied with State interests, and the creation a particular *order*, whereas the Right is now on the side of the resistance.
These shifts are strange and even surreal.
Now here is an odd anecdote: I have been reading up on the more or less standard critique of Marxianism. Marxianism as the empowerment of a materialist philosophy and employed as a critical tool to undermine (and transform) existing hierarchies. Basically this is the area that James Lindsay is working in. The work they are doing, it seems to me, is not that much different on some level from the anti-Marxism and anti-Communism of the 1950s. Then it was described as anti-communist hysteria. And certainly the same political police (the FBI) were deeply involved in the investigation of all groups that had communist affiliations and sympathies.
And here we are again in a sort of octave of a similar struggle. Or is it? Or really: What is
actually going on?
For all that I have sympathies with the intellectual and ideological analysis of James Lindsay, and for all that I understand the real and bona-fide destructiveness of Marxian doctrines in history (absolutely condemnable), and for all that Lindsay may indeed be *right*, I have the suspicion that larger powers and forces stand behind these ideological confrontations and battles.
What made me think this was reading these paragraphs directly from Karl Marx.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
For those with religious bent, Marx is described and presented as the Devil himself. And indeed as it turned out, historically, his political children have 100 million (and even possibly more) deaths attributable to their political machinations and revolutionary activism.
And yet he is working with ideas -- statements -- that (to me) seem unquestionably true. You see, he works within the realm of partial truths which he desires to transform into absolute truths that are given a fighting edge and can be used in real political and social battles.
I could take each of these sentences and explain why they are true, or have truth in them.
But they are not
the full picture.
To arrive at the *full picture* and real, honest and truthful statements about *what is really going on* requires the efforts and the perspectives of those of us who have
philosophical distance. But philosophical distance -- where we see the hypocrisy on each side and indeed in all perspectivism -- is not going to help us if in fact we have dedicated ourselves, and our core fighting, to one side or the other.
Note to All