Is it only me, or does it not seem like the official line of reasoning whenever it becomes apparent that the government or media are working diametrically against the interests of the population, is that those involved were stupid/incompetent, not actively criminal and malevolent in their behavior.
Same on Wall Street. The masters of the universe, the smartest guys in any room, always play dumb when caught. They claim to be unaware of what their subordinates, or in many cases, entire divisions were doing. They were never criminal fraudsters, just kinda dummies who didn’t know which way was up.
Same with the Federal Reserve. Much ink is spent discussion how clueless and stupid the Fed is, rather than acknowledging that its mandate is nothing like what the public believes. When the tiny franction of the richest grow impossibly richer due to its actions, it was an unforeseen consequence nobody could have predicted, not the specific goal of all involved.
Ditto for politicians. They are always buffoons rather than overt swindlers.
The question is why anyone buys this. I think it’s due to a deepset psychological desire to believe that our institutions and fellow man aren’t actively despotic and evil. Rather, they’re clueless bumblers who continuously call things wrong. When the CDC and WHO recommend actions that result in, at last estimate, some 40 million additional humans starving to death in the year since lockdowns began, it’s because nobody has any idea what is going on, not that they simply don’t care about another 40 million dead if they get their objectives met.
Nobody besides the kid robbing a liquor store or selling a baggie of weed to the wrong person ever went to jail for being stupid. Stupidity is the new get out of jail, or keep from being guillotined, fallback.
I hear this a lot during the pandemic with respect to government responses to a virus that the data now says is relatively benign. “They’re idiots.” “They were unprepared.” “It all got politicized.”
Never will the mainstream commentators say what is obvious: “Our trusted authorities are liars, and are working against us at every turn.”
Remember this next time you see someone excusing an authority for “not getting it.”
Few are as blind as those who benefit by not seeing. And these people didn’t get into positions of power or authority by being dumb, but rather by playing you for a fool. They aren’t stupid or unprepared or missing the obvious. They are doing exactly what is required of them, and the facts and data and public good have nothing whatsoever to do with it. At least by now, that is clear. The majority of those we have trusted with our wellbeing don’t deserve that trust, and have abused it for gain.
Question of how society ends up is what society is going to do about it. Because pretending all is well and this is just how things work is a guaranteed high speed trip to hell on a greased rail. And the media is working overtime to convince us that’s how it has to be. Private bankers need to print our money rather than the treasury. We should ignore thousands of physician reports from the field about alternative treatments that obviate emergency waivered inoculations. We should excuse the nonstop lies and gaslighting because people make mistakes and that is probably all this is. They are pushing a narrative where nobody in power should ever be held to real accountability. And to the extent a society accepts that propaganda, it is doomed.
Thanks, Russell. Can I offer - we seem to have an inbuilt bias to choose the easiest option for ourselves. Also, we are taught to believe in the power-hierarchy whereby we look up to deify but look down to vilify and, lastly, as you previously showed, we are of the herd and few of us like to deviate from the accepted wisdom. Lastly, few of us can get down low enough to see eye to eye with the 'elite.'