Agnotology

On Constructed Ignorance, The Pattern and The Anointed

Toby Rogers recently wrote this wonderful piece.

How anti-corporate agnotology studies got swamped by pro-corporate misinformation studies

This passage really stood out for me:

The premise of agnotology is both simple and profound. Most people think of ignorance as the absence of knowledge. Proctor and others in the field argue the opposite — that ignorance is socially constructed in the same way that knowledge is. Powerful interests instruct society to pay attention to some things and not others through a variety of inducements (you get paid to study certain topics and not others) and punishments (you will be blacklisted if you ask too many questions about forbidden topics). Over time these values become invisible and just a part of culture.

This idea of Constructed Ignorance has really stuck with me.

Off course! It’s so obvious when articulated.

If you control knowledge and sense making, then you control ignorance making. Duh!

What this also means is that you control capital R, Reality, or Reality™, and are able to shift it away from reality (more on this later).

Toby refers to “powerful interests” and I’ll also come back to them a bit later also.

The point that Toby makes about “instructing” and directing attention is key, and reminds me of the Drunkard’s Search:

A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".

Proctor in his masterpiece, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the cigarette catastrophe and the case for abolition” writes:

The tobacco makers are notorious masters of deception; they know how to manufacture ignorance and to rewrite history. They know the power of images and how to twist these to violate common sense and pulmonary civility. They also know how to engineer desire, and, of course, they’d like us to believe they don’t want youngsters to smoke. Health advocates have a good rule of thumb: ask cigarette makers what should be done (say, to curb youth smoking), and whatever they say, do the opposite.

---

… tobacco tycoons in the United States organized a global conspiracy to hide the hazards of smoking. The conspiracy begins with a series of meetings at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan in December of 1953 and is perfected through the establishment of bodies such as the tobacco Industry Research Committee, which provided the industry with a “stable” of expertise and a facade through which they could call for endlessly more research.

I think that Tobacco wrote the playbook that Pharma (and Bio-“defence”) has picked up, scaled and perfected.

This is the world we live in.

Enlightenment, with all its wonder, put the “light” in the hands of a the few, that it turns out could never be trusted. As society became more “scientific” and more data driven, those that controlled the data, controlled society. They shone the light wherever they chose to. Cancer…look here. Heart disease…look there. Covid…well you get the picture.

Well, the “picture” is whatever we get to see, because of the “directed light”. That “picture” is Reality, and reality is somewhere in the dark.

In July 2022, reflecting of Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, I wrote this:

1986 Act, Desmet, Fibreglass Logs and Mubongi

I’ve lived under an Iraqi dictatorship, and I now more properly understand that Totalitarianism and Dictatorship are nothing alike, they are apple and pineapple, two entirely different types of populations and population control.

In Iraq I lived among a population that was governed by a dictatorial regime. A pretty basic, ruthless and fear based model of population control. “Do as I say or else, I will kill you and your family” type of population management. What’s interesting now that I reflect back on those years, is that everyone lived within the same reality, everyone knew Saddam and his cronies were bad, some stayed out of their way (me and my family) and others made hay while the sun was shining, but it was the same reality. The inputs (what I like to call lego bits, or more fancifully called axioms) to everyone’s reality was thereabouts the same.

I can now say, from my cushy suburban home in Sydney’s north-shore that I am now living in a totalitarian state (if you read the book, and I strongly encourage you to do so, you will understand what I’m talking about). The inputs (the lego bits) that form people’s realities have been messed with, they’ve been corrupted, on scale and not just in Australia, and the realities they can construct with those corrupted (untrue) lego bits are different to my reality.

We now exist in two different realities.

In my reality the media lies, in theirs they don’t. In mine the jabs are dangerous in theirs the vaccines (because to them they are vaccines) are not. In my reality lockdowns were the greatest evil (now surpassed by the mass jab experiment) robbing populations of health, wealth, peace of mind and any certainty about the future. In their reality lockdowns saved countless lives…just listen to the daily news and they will tell you. And so on. Iraq was nothing like this, this is something else, this is different, and this is a very different type of scary.

The “few” are The Anointed.

Thomas Sowell, in arguably his most important book “The Vision of the Anointed”, writes:

The great ideological crusades of twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields—from the eugenics movement of the early decades of the century to the environmentalism of the later decades, not to mention the welfare state, socialism, communism, Keynesian economics, and medical, nuclear, and automotive safety. What all these highly disparate crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.

2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.

3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.

4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

What is incredible is that Sowell published this book in 1995. He could have written the exact same passage today. He, more than anyone I think, understands the soul of those, the few, that want to “save us”.

He goes on to write, in Chapter 2 about The Pattern.

THE PATTERN

They went to work with unsurpassable efficiency. Full employment, a maximum of resulting output, and general well-being ought to have been the consequence. It is true that instead we find misery; shame and, at the end of all, a stream of blood. But that was a chance coincidence. - Joseph A. Schumpeter

What is intellectually interesting about visions are their assumptions and their reasoning, but what is socially crucial is the extent to which they are resistant to evidence. All social theories being imperfect, the harm done by their imperfections depends not only on how far they differ from reality, but also on how readily they adjust to evidence, to come back into line with the facts. One theory may be more plausible, or even more sound, than another, but if it is also more dogmatic, then that can make it far more dangerous than a theory that is not initially as close to the truth but which is more capable of adjusting to feedback from the real world. The prevailing vision of our time—the vision of the anointed—has shown an extraordinary ability to defy evidence.

Characteristic patterns have developed among the anointed for dealing with the repeated failures of policies based on their vision. Other patterns have developed for seizing upon statistics in such a way as to buttress the assumptions of the vision, even when the same set of statistics contains numbers that contradict the vision. Finally, there is the phenomenon of honored prophets among the anointed, who continue to be honored as their predictions fail by vast margins, time and again. The first of these phenomena will be explored in this chapter, the others in the chapters that follow.

PATTERNS OF FAILURE

A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern typically has four stages:

STAGE 1. THE “CRISIS”

Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a “crisis,” even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a “crisis” has in fact already been getting better for years.

STAGE 2. THE “SOLUTION”

Policies to end the “crisis” are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and “simplistic,” if not dishonest. 

STAGE 3. THE RESULTS

The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z. 

STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE

Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as “simplistic” for ignoring the “complexities” involved, as “many factors” went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.

Examples of this pattern are all too abundant. Three will be considered here. The first and most general involves the set of social welfare policies called the “war on poverty” during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but continuing under other labels since then. Next is the policy of introducing “sex education” into the public schools, as a means of reducing teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases. The third example will be policies designed to reduce crime by adopting a less punitive approach, being more concerned with preventive social policies beforehand and rehabilitation afterward, as well as showing more concern for the legal rights of defendants in criminal cases.

It is this “resistance to evidence” that forms the foundation of socially “constructed ignorance”.

Small “r” reality gives feedback (evidence) and capital “R” Reality is set up to deny, denounce and resist it.

If a university, its teachers and curriculum are going to be resistant to evidence, then all we are left with is indoctrinators and the indoctrinated that then go out into society and destabilize it.

Back to the “powerful interests” Toby mentioned earlier. Because people don’t bump into these people and their interests day to day, they find it hard to believe that they exist and that they would want something for humankind that is different to the everyday person.

But “they” exist, that’s for sure, and for those of us who were asleep to their existence (that’s me with my hand up) we aren’t asleep anymore.

The best description of the anointed I have come across to date is Victor Davis Hanson describing them here in this stack on mine from Jan 2022.

The Unbekoming Express - Edition 1

The particular section is amount 3 minutes long from 58:30 to 1:01:30.

He describes a discussion with a “globalist”, in talking about a normal citizen, who said: “…tell me why you need a snowmobile or a jet ski…”. You will understand the context of the phrase when you listen to it. It was at this point in late 2020 when the penny finally dropped for me on what they mean when they talk about elites and globalists.

Karen Harradine has written a great 4-part series on some of them. It’s a great dummies guide to the subject.

The Indoctrinators, Part 1:  George Soros - The Conservative Woman

OSF’s brand of woke imperialism is dangerous. Broken people lead to broken societies, and then to failed states.  This is a perfect scenario for supranational organisations like the OSF to step into, to fuel Soros’s nightmarish idea of ‘utopia’. Supporting anarchists is a quick way to destroy Western societies so allowing the Indoctrinators to ‘Build Back Better’ as they would have it. To help catalyse this, OSF has, to date, given more than £33million to Black Lives Matter, the anti-Semitic Marxist organisation whose ambitions to ruin the once secure and democratic West align with those of Soros’s foundation.

The Indoctrinators, Part 2: Klaus Schwab - The Conservative Woman

The current board of trustees includes such dubious figures as former US Vice-President and climate change propagandist Al Gore, Canada’s deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Other board members are Kristalina Georgieva, MD of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the bosses of companies like Nestle, Siemens, BlackRock and Accenture, the director-general of the World Trade Organisation, and Queen Rania of Jordan, a country known for harbouring Islamist terrorists. Money buys a lot of influence, and there are few politicians willing to cross this gaggle.

The Indoctrinators, Part 3:  Bill Gates - The Conservative Woman

In 1997, Tony Blair invited him into Downing Street to sell his flawed computer system, going on to host him several times, implementing policies based on his dictates and in his financial interests. It was an association Blair was to prosper from, later getting $3.2million for his Global Africa initiative and more than $25.2million for his Institute of Global Change.

The Indoctrinators, Part 4: David Attenborough - The Conservative Woman

One of the most worrying aspects of the Indoctrinators’ war on humanity is their terrorising of children into believing that the world is going to end because of climate change. A letter sent by Attenborough to a school in Dubai, congratulating them their efforts in ‘saving the planet’, was used to promote a Global Social Leader’s schools’ ‘action project’. School children’s belief that the world is going to end because of climate change, and their resultant climate anxiety, has been shown to have a seriously detrimental affect on their mental health.

In 2020, with Netflix, Attenborough and the WWF launched Our Planet, a documentary laden with green evangelism, followed by the sequel, A Life On Our Planet, in cinemas across the globe. Lockdown victims watching Attenborough’s histrionics could console themselves that they were being justly punished for their climate change ‘sins’. His presence on the BBC continues unabated, insisting that we are all doomed for cataclysmic collapse unless ‘dramatic action’ is taken over climate change. 

“They” are a network beautifully recently depicted by Anne Gibbons.

WHO Hell

Before I wrap this up, let’s circle back to reality vs Reality, and the one and only CJ Hopkins.

The New Normal Left - CJ Hopkins (substack.com)

To understand it (which it would behoove us to do), we need to understand global-capitalist ideology, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. Global capitalism has no ideology … or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you have no ideological adversaries, you don’t need an ideology. You’re basically God. “Reality” is whatever you say it is, and whoever disagrees is a “science denier,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” or a “malinformationist,” or some other type of deluded “extremist.” You don’t need to argue ideology with anyone, because you have no ideological opponents. Society is divided into two fundamental groups, (a) “normal people,” who accept “reality,” and (b) the “deviants” and “extremists,” who do not. Your political and ideological opponents are pathologized, preemptively delegitimized. After all, who would argue against “reality” except liars and the clinically insane?

And finally, CJ again with the last work.

The Big Smoke (and Mirrors) - CJ Hopkins (substack.com)

OK, before somebody calls me a “conspiracy theorist,” GloboCap is not a bunch of guys in a room conspiring to do all this. Global capitalism is a system. Systems function according to their own structures and logic. What I'm talking about is not individual people conspiring (although individual people certainly do, and that is part of it). I'm talking about the logical evolution of a global-hegemonic ideological system, i.e., a system without external enemies, which has nothing left to do but consolidate power and eliminate internal resistance. If you understand the last 5-6 years (actually the last 30 years) that way, as I do, this shift to a less democratic, more ideologically monolithic, more totalitarian social structure (i.e., the “New Normal”) is not at all surprising. On the contrary, it is the next logical step.

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