Culture of Deception Interlude...

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country."


Raymond Chandler on Advertising.

The man has a point. But he lived in a period of relative civil society, corrupt and problematic as it was (institutionalized racism, to name just one thing). Today he'd have to right this:

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of political culture caused by a constant flow of fraudulent conspiracy theories is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country."

Films like Fahrenheit 9-11 and Loose Change serve only one purpose, ultimately: to muddy the waters, to make clarity more difficult in the pursuit of the inane. By debasing knowledge and reducing it to opinion they remove the essential difference between the two. As the saying goes, you can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts.

But if your goal is to undermine and destroy political culture, then by all means present your opinions as facts. By removing and eliminating the difference between the two you've accomplished a lot: you've removed reason and argumentation, debate from the political arena and replace it with activism and the cultural meme of whoever shouts the longest and loudest gets his way.

Jerry Springer political culture.