This is a really interesting clip from Charlie Brooker's 2014 Wipe. Adam Curtis has discussed the idea before, but this hypothesizes that the reaction most people have to the media ('oh dear' because they feel it is something they can do nothing about) is now being deliberately invoked by politicians and media elites as a form of control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPMWhat particularly stood out was this quote about the war in Ukraine, from one of Putin's advisors.
The underlying aim, Serkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception in order to manage and control.
By continually throwing contradictory information into the mainstream, and flooding us with a stream of information with little context (or deliberately misleading context) we are kept in a state of uncertainty where we do not have the tools necessary to form a coherent alternative to the decisions that are being made on our behalf. They - the politicians and decision makers - deliberately want to make people throw up their hands and say 'oh dear' because merely recognizing that a thing is bad
does not threaten them. Especially when they are ostensibly agreeing with you that the situation is bad and they would like to change it, whilst simultaneously working to perpetuate it.
This kind of thinking seems like it'd be quite familiar to Discordians - and it plays into some of the behaviours we talk about with people taking the opinions of their 'group' and seeing it as an attack on their identities when those opinions and assumptions are attacked. It is more sinister than we often ascribe to - I don't know about anyone else, but I assumed that the politicians were as much a victim of confirmation bias as anyone else, and tended to just be blind to the inherent contradictions in what they were saying.
But the quotes from the Russian advisor seem like a convincing argument that this isn't the case.
It also feels like I've been falling for this myself. Looking back over the year - longer, really - the news has just been a constant stream of horrible situations with the end result generally being a sense of powerlessness.
The question is, knowing this, what do you
do about it? It is almost the opposite of 1984's Ministry of Truth. Where the Ministry of Truth wanted to reinvent the past and make people believe in their version of events, this strategy relies on nobody knowing the present and casting doubt on the past so that the status quo can just continue. If you can't pin down what's happening, you can't respond to it. There's been massive anger and outcry over all sorts of issues over the past few years - MP's expenses, child abuse, banker's bonuses, the financial crisis and the Occupy movement - but this anger has failed to result in any actual changes or serious action (aside from some arrested celebrities) and eventually the news cycle just moves on with no resolution.
It seems like a strong and independent press to confront politicians when they lie and mislead, and hold them to account, should be the answer. In practice, any more voices will just add to the cacophony, because having many conflicting messages is itself part of the strategy. This problem is likely exacerbated in the UK by the fact the BBC has taken impartiality to mean 'give equal voice to the two most polarized individuals we can find on any issue'.
Step 1 is probably 'refuse to accept that things can't get better'. I'm just not sure how to translate 'media is probably being manipulated in order to provide confusion' into useful actions.