An informal metric for measuring the stability of a society is the distance between reality and the official truth of the ruling regime. The more lies the regime tells, the less stable it and the society over which it rules. Official lies are a good proxy for the degree of authoritarianism within the regime. The degree of authoritarianism is a good proxy for the level of official insecurity. The more thuggish the regime the less support it enjoys, thus the more it needs to lie to the people.
At the extreme end of this metric is a place like North Korea. The regime is deeply paranoid about everything. The Kim family does not trust anyone in the ruling class and no one in the ruling class trusts anyone, especially Kim. The one thing everyone agrees upon is they cannot trust the people. This is why they get images of the tubby Kim in heroic poses or stories of him making ten holes in one playing golf. The regime feels it needs to present him as a god to intimidate the people.
On the other end of the spectrum, you get a place like Switzerland that barely has a government relative to the rest of Europe. Many Swiss residents do not know who is currently holding the position of president. It is a rotating position currently held by someone calling herself Simonetta Sommaruga. The Swiss government has no need to turn her into a rock star or make while claims about her. The official truth of Switzerland is easy for everyone to see, so they have no need to lie.
Obviously, it is an informal metric that is subjective. An extreme case like North Korea is easy to use, but where would France or Germany fall on the scale? They are closer to Switzerland than Ukraine or the United States, but not so close that anyone in France would say they believe their government. In fact, that is the story of the Wets since the end of the Cold War. Every Western nation has moved down the scale of honesty toward the North Korean pole over the last three decades.
Lying has consequences. One lie begets another lie which then requires more elaborate lying to cover up the previous lies. This lowers trust in the state, but it also lowers trust in institutions and eventually lowers social trust. Step one is the lies erode faith in the ruling class of the country. Step two is people lose faith in the institutions for not having punished the liars. The final step is the people who wake up to the official lies lose trust in those who keep falling for the lies.
You see this with the school shootings. Generations of lying about the nature of crime and the role of guns in these school shooting, have made it impossible to have a civil conversation about the issue. The bodies were not even cold after the latest school shooting and the usual suspects were out in public telling the all to familiar lies about the causes of these crimes. The only thing that comes from this is normal people grow to hate these liars a little more than they did yesterday.
How many people watched President Biden speak about the Texas shooting? The answer, if it was possible to get an honest one, was close to zero. Joe Biden has been a promiscuous liar for generations. Now he is an incontinent zombie barely able to read his script. That script is written by the same collection of sociopaths than have infected politics since the Clintons blew into town. Even the sociopaths have lost interest in the production of these ridiculous theaters of mendacity.
Tragic outliers like a deranged lunatic going on a rampage are just part of the human condition, but can something be done to limit it? It feels like this stuff happens more often now, but who can know? The even bigger question is why are these obviously deranged people ignored by the people around them? The Buffalo shooter was ignored by everyone, despite the obvious signs. The liars fill the space with lies about the subject so that getting a straight answer is impossible.
Of course, the reason the liars exist is they keep people off balance. Official lying has been outsourced in what may be the most cyclical public-private partnership in human history, so that the rulers can just nod along with the symphony of lies. Biden’s script writers just go to one of the websites of the many organizations who exist to produce official nonsense and jot down a few of their lines. The mass media, of course, then blasts this and their own lies to the public.
One of the underrated aspects of Orwell’s Animal Farm is how the pigs used deception to create doubt among the animals. It reached the point where the animals could not trust their own memory. The other day, the Washington Post claimed George Floyd was shot by police. How long before school children are taught that he was hanged by the Proud Boys? More important, how many people will tire of correcting the record and this lie becomes official truth?
The official lies are not just about keeping the public confused. It also serves to keep the managerial class huddled together. On the topic of official lies, the classic Vaclav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless” comes to mind. Amazingly, the people who shower the public with disinformation, the official lies, claim to be fighting against disinformation, often citing Havel’s essay. The lying is an important part of their identity as a besieged group defending “our democracy.”
In the final years of the Soviet Union, the general public no longer believed anything said by their government. The people in government were every bit as cynical about the official truths, but they were paid to lie so they lied. What held it together is both sides were sure the other side believed the lies, at least enough of them that the rest dared not question the lies. The collapsed came when everyone realized that no one believed what they were forced to say or forced to hear.
Havel opened his famous essay with this line. “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called dissent.” He then explained, “It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity.” That was almost fifty years ago in a world that is largely forgotten by modern people, yet terribly familiar to us now.
The final sentence of that opening paragraph is, “What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.” One paragraph from a dissident operating in an alien system from the past captures the current moment in America. A decade later that system collapsed. That is what the sea of lies from our rulers tells us about what lies ahead. A regime built on lies always ends in collapse.
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collapse followed by disassociation. i think the collapse of the CCCP (and its satellite states) is instructive in that it didn’t result in a dystopian Mad Max style after. things were definitely grim over there, for a few years, but not a mass die off. and for the most part the resulting systems of governance were better than what came before. when AINO collapses in the next couple of years, I look forward to participating in a golden era of personal liberty.
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I’m not sure I’d be that optimistic. Even if DC fell tomorrow, the left still enjoy the support of most major cities, a number of key states, woke capital, the academy, the military and even the major churches.
Unfortunately, this puts them in an excellent position to decide what comes next after the current government collapses. Likely they’d have a new government formed while the right was still busy infighting, one even less friendly to our interests than the current one.
There are factions from all over the political spectrum that seem to be convinced if Washington falls, power will drop into their hands like an overripe fruit. That will make for interesting times when it finally happens. Bad as it is, it’s not clear to me that the collapse of the current government would be to our advantage, at least currently. We aren’t the only ones waiting for an opportunity, nor are we the best positioned to take advantage of it when it happens.
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“A regime built on lies always ends in collapse.”
Is there a way to help move this process along? I’m getting too old and too impatient.
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Did the managerial class in the USSR love the lies and were they proud to believe them? My guess is no but I don’t know.
Most of the West’s feminized managerial class loves the lies and is eager to embrace them. That seems like it will help the system stumble along for a greater time than if the managerial class was more resistant to living in a country based on lies.
Another thing that will help the ruling carry on no matter how much they lie is a sizable percentage of the country is now from countries where people just expect their leaders to lie. Given life is better still in the US than in their home countries, the lying doesn’t bother them as much as it does traditional white Americans. In fact the lying plays to their advantage because they have cultures that view gaming the system as a good move of it helps their families.
These changes bring a new set of problems though to the system that can undermine it in other ways
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> Most of the West’s feminized managerial class loves the lies and is eager to embrace them. That seems like it will help the system stumble along for a greater time than if the managerial class was more resistant to living in a country based on lies.
Some of the elites in the U.S., specifically people like Musk, Thiel, and even Bezos, are testing the waters in creating a counter-elite, I think mostly because they either have grandiose plans for humanity that incompetence has stymied, or they’re just sick of dealing with their crap.
The burgeoning counter elite still will not have us in their best interests, but it’s better than the open contempt we get now
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Bingo!
The big difference between the current West and the old East is that the managerial class – and a decent percentage of whites – believe the lies. Indeed, the lies are their identity.
I highly doubt much of the ruling class in the old East believed their lies. They just said them out of habit and to stay in power. They were likely much more realistic their our ruling class.
In the US, you have three general groups.
1. Non-whites who don’t believe the lies but play along because it’s good for them and they can stick to whitey.
2. Bad whites who don’t believe the lies but have no power to fight back
3. Good whites who believe the lies
Non-whites and Good whites are teaming up against Bad whites because it works for both, but it’s an unstable alliance.
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Agree with your points but I would add a 4th category of blacks. Hispanic males are not as enamored of violent blacks as are many White women. That is causing a split between the Good Whites/tribe and Hispanics.
Asians, especially Chinese, view blacks as inferior and don’t like being physically abused by them or having their kids being at a disadvantage in getting into the right universities because everything is being dumbed down for blacks. So it will be interesting to see if this eventually causes a split between the Good Whites/tribe and the Asians
“A regime built on lies always ends in collapse.”
The chubby kid who makes 10 holes in one at golf is smiling at you.
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….and Biden can’t even make the toilet
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the world is his toilet
Switzerland is my favorite country. Oh, what a curse that I wasn’t born Swiss!
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There’s a great line, “God made Switzerland to show that a republic could work. He made America to warn everyone else.”
If you have to make policy, asking “does this make us more like the Swiss government?” Is a good question.
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I think you’re giving the Europeans a little too much credit regarding where to place them on the polarities. Especially the Deutschbags. In Austria right now there’s a kid looking at five years for making pro-white rap songs, in one of which (“Dear Donald”) he accuses Trump of abandoning his base and closes with the line, “I used to laugh at David Duke.” It’s clever and caustic, but that the rulers are so quick to overreact means we’re probably closer to outright confrontation between the ruled and rulers than we think, unless they go full North Korea on the populous, which they might. I could see them freeing the Jan 6 Gentiles into a field and firing mortars at them “until not even a hair remains,” as Dear Leader once requested of traitors. Pelosi could watch it remotely and down pints of rum raisin while watching those badwhites dematerialize. Every media story that omits Biden soiling himself and stumbling over his words is basically a “Ten Hole in Ones for Dear Leader” moment. Alas, I think this ends in even more tears than the Fall of Hungary or the Soviet Union. Those rulers were, as you mentioned, just exhausted liars. Our liars believe not just their own lies, but grow more zealous and energized the more they’re exposed and challenged. Sure, they lose quickly in a standup fight (assuming they don’t just flee the country), but they may have already done enough damage to result in things like mass hunger and complete infrastructure collapse once the effects of their Faucian Bargain catch up with the cause. “Conspiracy theorists” claim the monkey pox outbreak looks a hell of a lot like a simulation that cretininous plutocrat Bill Gates ran last year. Eventually something is going to escape one of Nuland’s “research labs” to thin the herd of Kissinger’s “useless eaters.” They have the moral-religious justification to kill us all, already worked out, i.e. unless humanity’s carbon footprint is reduced, the Anthropocene epoch will lead to the total destruction of the Earth. Jim Kunstler says he’s making friends with the Amish in his neck of the woods in Upstate, New York. Not a bad idea…
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” Every media story that omits Biden soiling himself and stumbling over his words is basically a “Ten Hole in Ones for Dear Leader” moment.”
That’s a brilliant line. But/for the expanse of land and people, the United States government tomorrow probably would elect to do as you wrote, kill its people en masse. It really cannot do so, at least yet, so the lies have to accelerate for power to be maintained. It is a fool’s errand to speculate as to how this ends, but the Empire of Lies is increasingly isolated and exposed. I’ve come to the conclusion it could be toppled rather quickly but people do not have an appetite to do so, at least yet, and probably never will go to that extreme. The unraveling likely will continue until there is a de facto dissolution, to hazard a guess, but again that’s a fools’ errand.
This goes to the point Z made: no one really is tuned into what Biden or other federal figureheads say at this point, and the lies are just assumed to the extent anyone bothers to pay attention. This is not a country that should be flirting with war because, frankly, no one supports it very much, if they bother to care at all.
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You would need to free them from the media matrix first.
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Social media also allows lies to quickly fool good people, last night on Gab and other social media phony pictures of a transvestite were passed as authentic pictures of the shooter mixed in with actual real pictures of the shooter.
And it only takes a minute for those false pictures to go worldwide.
I don’t like transvestites and I am sure many here share that feeling so it’s natural for us on this side of the great divide to fall for the bait.
It’s a chaotic mess anywhere we look for accurate information and it makes me want to just move to the mountains somewhere and shut everyone and everything out.
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I just assumed those pics were real. In clown world, crossdressing Mexican mass murder seems like the logical next step.
Speaking of North Korea, I see no evidence that Dear Leader and the rest of the ruling class hate the population they rule as do the leaders in the White West. That doesn’t mean that they are obsessed with the general welfare but they also don’t seem to want to replace their populace with a lower IQ and more violent one either.
Granted North Korea is no paradise but most of what is written about it is lies just like everything that is written about american by the propaganda arm of the American Empire.
Felix Abt has written two books about his long-term experience as a capitalist in North Korea that I recommend. He found the place is dramatically different than how portrayed in the Western press
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Not so much “hello fellow Koreans”
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It is amazing what an addition it is to the survivability of a society it is to subtract one tiny tribe
Once you get to a certain state, the lies aren’t created to convince, but to muddy the waters so much a counter-narrative is impossible to form. The media saturation can only focus on one or two shiny objects at a time, it makes it impossible to discuss long-term and more pertinent topics that could upset the managerial class.
Try getting a discussion of immigration in the two years of the Covid circus, or federal corruption when everyone is wearing a Ukraine pin. It’s a real-time drama with a bunch of lousy actors reciting a stupid script, and both of the two channels you are allowed to watch just have a different flavor.
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This is the real power of modern media. It is not their ability to convince people of nonsense. It is their ability to keep people from focusing on the truth. It is the power to ignore.
Every Western nation has moved down the scale of honesty toward the North Korean pole over the last three decades.
Coincidentally concurrent with the rise of the internet and alternative news sources. TBH, I don’t think they lied less, I think they’re just got caught less.
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“I don’t think they lied less, I think they’re just got caught less.”
I disagree, i think they’ve been caught more…… and nothing happens.
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Yes, I fucked up that last clause: they got away with more lies back before the internet.
One example from Denmark is called The Discordant Melody by policy wonks: our official policy on nuclear weapon, from somewhere in the late fifties up to the eighties, was that Denmark would not accept nuclear weapons on Danish territory. This was pertinent to Greenland where the US has a base – Thule Airbase – and to when US warships passed through Danish waters going to the Baltic.
Every government knew there were nuclear weapons on Thule Airbase, but in public they vehemently denied any such suggestion. Tens of thousands of public servants, diplomats, military personnel and journalists knew what was going on but the larger public was successfully kept in the dark, even after a B-52 accidentally dropped a thermonuclear bomb off the coast of Greenland.
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I think they lied less. The end of the Cold War was an inflection point in America. The Clintons blew into town and political discourse collapsed soon after. Watch a public affairs show from 1985 and then the same show from 1995 and it is two different universes.
All governments lie and every society has pretty lies. This greases the wheels of society. The lying has a purpose beyond the interests of the person telling the lie. When you tell the wife she looks like she did when you met her, you are not doing that for selfish reasons. It is part of making the marriage work. The same holds in human society.
Much of the lying today is purely driven by self-interest, but much of it also just for sport. I have joked that Hillary Clinton is the sort of person who orders a turkey club for lunch and when the waiter brings the sandwich, she swears she ordered tuna. The reason is she just likes lying.
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I’d agree that the Clintons were the pivot point. They were pure, unadulterated schemers – and everyone knew it. Their inner circle was the same way. Carville, Begala, Dick Morris, etc., they were all open about their motives.
Clinton brought in the idea of the continuous campaign and saying whatever was required to stay popular. He was a liar and everyone knew it. It was a game with him. He was also pretty open about wanting to profit off of being president.
You could argue that Johnson had the same vibe, but the Clintons changed the presidency and the whole culture of Washington.
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I think they lied less.
The thing is, we’ll never know because back in the Paper Age, memoryholed stories stayed memoryholed.
That is why I think they lied less. It was so much more difficult to lie effectively. For starters, the lie needed much more time to gain circulation. Then there was the threat of nuclear annihilation. Social trust was vitally important to the project of avoiding extinction. The need for America to be strong both culturally and economically was a front brain concern for the ruling class.
The end of the Cold War unleashed forces society was no longer built to counter. American society and the ruling class had become dependent upon the restraining force of the Cold War. When that was removed, we were easy prey to the sociopathic elements. People forget just how repulsed old Washington was by the new politics of the Clintons, but they had no way to deal with these new vulgarians who could not be shamed.
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That is why I think they lied less. It was so much more difficult to lie effectively. For starters, the lie needed much more time to gain circulation.
Good point. Now they can lie thirty times an hour.
do you think mass immigration contributed to the “need” to lie, politically?
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If you couldn’t understand that trickle down economics wasn’t a bunch of BS then i don’t know what to think. Regan wasn’t the saint the media paints him to be, ramping up debt and so forth and letting wall street loose. I point the fall beginning with him, even before the Clintons. The Clintons just didn’t have any shame is all.
The best way to “redistribute wealth” is to foster small business, it gives people skin in the game and teaches responsibility. Just my opinion.
“If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” That was famous in the 1890’s and we know who great things were for the common man back then. Its essentially the same as trickle down, just a bit more honest. 😉
Obama still is lying about Trayvon, saying three months ago his death, “was the start of America looking inward and in fits and starts coming to terms with what has always been our original sin.”
Of course, Trayvon was trying to murder Zimmerman, who defended himself, as clearly came out in the trial that acquitted him.
Obama’s video was put up by the Toilet Paper of Record, the NYT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1kTEit6-qw
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Caught Biden’s “statement”. It was exactly the stumbling, mumbling mess I’d expect from an Alzheimers patient just off being transported through a dozen time zones. Still not sure what he said.
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The latest issue of Chronicles had a good article on mental illness and homeless crime. It out from behind the paywall right now on their website.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/featured/the-roots-of-americas-mentally-ill-homelessness-crisis/
The question it leaves unanswered is, even if we were able to bring back some sort of asylum system for these people, who on earth would we get to work there? This is work most people wouldn’t want to do at any pay.
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Who would be diagnosed as mentally ill in this day and age?
Every mental illness is a cause to attack society via normalization of dysfunction.
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The answer to the mental illness question is an easy one.
I forget who made the observation that the two erstwhile superpowers [then the GAE and the USSR] were always in a state of retrograde, such that the U.S. was slowly creeping back towards authoritarianism while the USSR inched away from dictatorship towards more ‘freedom.’ Kipling seems to have had it wrong, as indeed the twain will eventually meet in a soft-core Leviathan state where you will own nothing and be happy of it. Or, at least you will be told you are happy. After all, retrograde motion is illusory.
As the scales drop from our eyes, the last thing we see is the mouth of the beast closing on us.
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In regards to the school shootings, I would love to see the medical records opened. I am willing to wager that all mass shooters (of the none Chiraq varietal) are doped up to the eyeballs on SSRIs. I wonder who lobbied to keep medical records private? Of course, this will never happen. Biden called out the powerful “gun lobby” in his speech; none seem to care about the pharmaceutical lobby that keeps the salient data hidden. Outrageous. Same with teen suicide. I realize someone can counter that, They were on SSRIs for a reason. Yeah, but maybe those pills put extra stress on a building that was already not up to code.
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The kid who shot up the black church is a good example of this. One would think that giving powerful psychoactive drugs to young people would be a concern on its own. The growing aberrant behavior of young people should at least bring the topic into the discussion, but that is not possible.
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America’s electronic media has driven its people mad. There is no return from madness.
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“A regime built on lies always ends in collapse”.
God speed the day.
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