by Mickey Huff
From the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 to the Clear Skies Act of 2003, legislation adverse to Americans’ common interests was euphonized (and euphemized) with names that implied support for the very causes that the acts flaunted. Thus, provisions of the PATRIOT Act, such as the notorious “sneak and peek” provisions, were arguably unconstitutional and therefore markedly unpatriotic, while the Clear Skies Act actually permitted widespread air pollution instead of cleaning it up. Yet the corporate media soft-peddled the legalization of such “unitary executive authority” while the average American citizen quietly acquiesced—some for want of knowledge, and others for failure to appreciate the potential of such legislation to undermine democracy.
Here then lies the crux of the problem: the corporate media do not ask the tough questions, and the people do not hold their feet to the fire. And public complacency reinforces government authority. We have tacitly condoned the demise of Fourth Amendment protections by not speaking up, and have passively sat by as the information portals have been dumbed down, controlled, and manipulated.
Nevertheless, we are a civilization governed by laws, and laws are supposed to ensure that the transfer of power preserves our civil liberties and democratic principles enshrined in the United States Constitution. Protection against encroachment on fundamental rights such as due process is not supposed to be based on faith that a government will not abuse its power. Thus, all Americans should care about the prospect that Barack Obama’s administration (or a subsequent government administration) might, without judicial oversight, evoke the dubious provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act to destroy the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of anyone it perceives to stand in its way.7
To take back America, we must arm ourselves with reason. This means identifying and abandoning the self-defeating, anti-empirical, inauthentic, conformist styles of thinking that have made us gullible pawns, and substituting them for more rational, critical, and independent thinking.
While many Americans believe that the answer to stopping government oppression is to arm all Americans with guns, or at least to prevent government from placing any restrictions on our Second Amendment rights, neither proposal will achieve the desired end of protecting liberty and freedom if we are still uninformed, misinformed, or not thinking rationally. As our first priority, therefore, it is far better to “arm ourselves with the power which knowledge gives,” as James Madison once wrote—to arm ourselves with reason and understanding.
HOW TO THINK FOR YOURSELF
A single article cannot cover all the rational thought processes that can help to promote democracy and protect us against totalitarianism’s creep.8 Nevertheless, the remainder of this article presents an overview of six practices that are crucial to thinking for ourselves in order to defend our nation against its most formidable enemies, human gullibility and unreason:
Ask for explanations.
Look for consistency.
Question the status quo; don’t just believe it.
Believe only credible authorities.
Watch out for fear mongering and demagoguery.
Beware of media-supported stereotypes.
Taken together, these six instructions provide a useful heuristic for determining whether you are justified in accepting any media claim. In what follows, each is considered in its turn.
1. Ask for explanations.
Constant 24/7 news feeds on cable television networks such as Fox and CNN would suggest that Americans are kept well-informed; however, by any reasonable standard of what it means to be informed, this assumption is false.
What we really get when we tune into corporate network news is a stream of reports about disconnected events in the world with little or no attempt to explain them. This happenstance rendition of reality as depicted by corporate news media is an important part of herding Americans into blind conformity.
Political scientist Michael Parenti astutely observed, “We are left to see the world as do mainstream pundits, as a scatter of events and personalities propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, bungled operations, and individual ambitions—rarely by powerful class interests.”9 However, being adequately informed requires understanding these events, even though the underpinnings that support such knowledge have been removed. Thus, “we read or hear that ‘fighting broke out in the region,’ or ‘many people were killed in the disturbances,’ or ‘famine is on the increase.’ Recessions apparently just happen like some natural phenomenon (‘our economy is in a slump’), having little to do with the constant war of capital against labor and the contradictions between productive power and earning power.”10
Decontexualized news reports enable corporate media to spin reality to serve specific political agendas. Thus, being told that the “insurgents killed ten American troops” leaves out the fact that the so-called “insurgents” were motivated to defend their homeland against invaders—not unlike what motivated the Americans themselves to attack British invaders during the Revolutionary War. Here, emotionally charged pejorative language (“insurgent”) fortifies the absolutis-tic notion that there is only one side to a story—the American side. The combination manipulates rather than informs.
So, as consumers of information, we must dig deeper beneath the surface by looking for explanations. We can’t simply expect the corporate media to provide them for us. We must conduct our own investigations and seek out investigative journalism that provides context and deeper understanding. This means gathering evidence from multiple sources, not just corporate media but also independent and foreign sources.11
For example, in the past decade, thousands have been killed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)—commonly called drones—in Pakistan. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, since 2004 there have been 2,541 to 3,533 casualties estimated; 411 to 884 of these were civilians, and 168 to 197 were children. In addition, there were between 1,173 and 1,472 injured.12 But the corporate media has given only lip service to these atrocities. The inadequate coverage by the corporate media is itself a story.
Digging deeper means finding out why these atrocities were not adequately covered, and taking a look at who owns the corporate media can help to uncover hidden motivation. The reality is less shocking when one learns that General Electric (GE) is a major drone and weapons manufacturer.13 Prior to 2011, at the height of the Afghanistan War, GE owned NBC Universal, one of the largest media corporations on earth. Identifying and verifying connections among the media and telecommunication conglomerates and the US government help form the framework necessary to understand why the corporate media has been remiss in its First Amendment duty to keep the American people informed about questionable government activities, especially inside the military-industrial complex.14
Finding an explanation for something is not good enough, though. The explanation must not be based on speculation; it must instead be based on facts that make it probable. In other words, an explanation is probable to the extent that it is supported by known facts. Thus, the explanation that the US went to war in Iraq to free the Iraqi people from oppression does not adequately comprise enough known facts to be probable. For instance, it does not explain why the US invaded Iraq rather than some other nation such as Sudan, where the genocide in Darfur took place. Similarly, the explanation that the US went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a threat to the US does not take into account why the weapons inspectors were never able to find any such weapons, or why Bush ignored Hussein’s open invitation for United Nations weapons inspectors to come to Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and interview Iraqi scientists and engineers.15
On the other hand, the explanation that the motive for the war was to advance US influence in the Middle East is based on many verifiable facts: For example, the Bush administration was largely composed of members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a politically influential group of far right (“neoconservative”) ideologues whose profess
ed goal was to advance the US’s influence in the Middle East, especially Iraq, through military action. Also, according to the Downing Street memos, the Bush administration had already made up its mind to invade Iraq even though it admitted that the case for WMD was weak and that it was necessary to “make the facts fit the policy.”16
2. Look for consistency.
Facts must be consistent. To the extent that an explanation is inconsistent with the facts, the explanation is not probable. Reality is important in that it is consistent; if a claim is false it will sooner or later have to reckon with reality. One falsehood may be heaped on top of another in order to avoid reality’s indictment, but sooner or later the false belief will run up against a consistent network of truth.
A false media claim is no different. This is why you need to check several independent sources before accepting something as fact. For example, in 2005, when the New York Times “broke” the story that Bush was spying on Americans without warrants,17 this contradicted Bush’s prior claim that he was first obtaining warrants. So why did Bush lie to the American people?
One possible explanation is that he did not want the American people to know that they were being spied on because they would protest and try to put an end to it. As it turned out, the New York Times did not quite tell the truth (or at least not the whole truth) either, for it claimed that Bush was only wiretapping American citizens’ international calls and not their domestic calls. However, Mark Klein, an AT&T whistleblower, refuted this claim by providing design documents of the equipment used to tap all calls (both domestic and international) and to route their contents to National Security Agency (NSA) computers hidden deeply within AT&T centers.18 So, it appeared that neither the corporate media (in particular, the New York Times) nor the government cared to broker the truth; and this was evident by the inconsistency of their claims with verifiable facts.
3. Question the status quo; don’t just believe it.
This leads to another important standard of rationality. Don’t believe something just because it’s popular. Indeed, some of the most popular beliefs are the biggest myths, as the Disney lemming story illustrated.
For example, federal law requires all telecommunication companies (such as Comcast and AT&T) to provide facilities for government surveillance equipment. How likely is it that these companies would divulge their roles in helping the government to spy on American citizens? Not very, and as a result, most Americans believe that their personal phone messages are private. But sometimes an unexpected comment by an invited guest can breach even the corporate media’s veil of secrecy. Here is one telling example:
After the authorities released pictures of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased Boston bomber, his wife Katherine Russell placed a phone call to him. Corporate media, including the New York Times, downplayed any possibility that the phone conversation could be retrieved. Thus, the candor of Tim Clemente, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counterterrorism agent, caught CNN’s Erin Burnett off guard when she interviewed him. “There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?” asked Burnett, attempting to lead Clemente to the status quo response. But here is the transcript of the dialog that followed:
CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.19
Burnett’s quip about what people are saying was obviously an attempt to discredit Clemente’s claim; for if that is what people are saying, then they must be right. Right?
Wrong. And Clemente’s bluntness about the truth resonates with the importance of not believing something just because it is popularly believed.
A popular antiwar slogan during the 1960s and ‘70s in the US— “What would happen if they made a war and no one came?”—un-derscores the very serious truth that unnecessary and immoral wars (such as the Iraq War) and other forms of needless aggression are possible only because masses of people are willing to unquestioningly support them instead of thinking for themselves. For many, it is heresy to question the authority of the commander in chief. These are people who say, “The president said there are WMD [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq, so he must know. After all, he’s the president.” This is blind trust in authority, the type of trust that made it possible for power-grabbing “authorities” like Bush to cancel the great writ of habeas corpus, operate prison camps that mercilessly tortured prisoners of war, contravene the Geneva Conventions, issue signing statements that nullified and trivialized the power of Congress, ignore congressional subpoenas, fire federal prosecutors for political reasons not relevant to their performances, stack the Supreme Court with political ideologues calculated to rubber stamp the neoconservative political agenda, deprive citizens of their First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly, contravene the American citizen’s Fourth Amendment right against warrantless searches and seizures, and a host of other illegal and unconstitutional actions and policies.
And it is the same blind trust that presently allows the Obama administration to operate illegal assassination squads, launch robotic drone attacks that kill innocent civilians and children, continue to operate the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, hold detainees indefinitely without due process, pass laws that permit government to conduct mass warrantless dragnets of millions of American citizens, and involuntarily detain and rendition American citizens without judicial oversight or protection. These and many other policies now operating under the Obama administration are a continuation—in some cases an expansion—of the Bush administration’s illegal policies, except that they have now been made part of the legal fabric of our nation. In other words, many of the policies that were illegal under the Bush administration are now “legal” under the Obama administration.
And the majority of Americans do not even question “the law.” After all, these previously unlawful practices are now (officially) legal. Never mind that the First Amendment is supposed to protect peaceful assembly to protest government breaches of civil liberties, especially ones it alleges are “legal.” Unfortunately, the Obama administration made it clear how intolerant it was of the exercise of this fundamental constitutional right when it classified the Occupy movement as a “domestic terrorist threat” complete with FBI monitoring despite the fact that the only violence perpetrated was against the demonstrators by local authorities.20
But there is still another, even more insidious form of blind acceptance of authority that works through intimidation, and to which many have been party. Psychologist Erich Fromm referred to this form as anonymous authoritarianism.21 Anonymous authoritarianism contrasts with blind acceptance of authority (in which there is an identifiable person/s—for example, the president) by having no identifiable individual authority.
In anonymous authoritarianism, claimed Fromm, “nobody makes a demand, neither a person nor an idea nor a moral law. Yet we all conform as much or more than people in an intensely authoritarian society would.” Here the authority is a vacuous “It.” And what is “It”? It is “profit, economic necessity, the market, common sense, public opinion, what ‘one’ does, thinks, or feels.” Since this “authority” is not overtly identifiable, it is nearly unassailable. “Who can attack the invisible? Who can rebel against Nobody?”22
According to Fromm, the mechanism by which this form of authority works is that of conformity: “I ought to do what everybody does, hence, I must conform, not be different, not ‘stick out’ . . . The only thing which is permanent in me is just this readiness for change. Nobody has power over me, except the herd of which I am a par
t, yet to which I am subjected.”23
A clear antidote to this malignant form of thinking is that stressed by W. K. Clifford, as cited earlier: “It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.”24 Whether the claim in question is popular or not, whether you will be loved or hated for not believing (or disbelieving) it, and whether it makes you stand out or fit in, all these things are irrelevant but for the need—no, the urgency—to commit yourself only to that which has rational merit.
4. Believe only credible authorities.
Of course, we are not always in a position to assess for ourselves whether a claim has rational merit. To the extent that we are not experts or “authorities” on given matters, we must rely on the testimony of others who are indeed experts in their respective fields.
In this regard, Clemente’s testimony refuting the status quo belief that Americans still enjoy a right to privacy in their personal telephone conversations was credible for two reasons. First, he was a former FBI counterterrorism agent. If anyone knows about such matters, it is someone with his background and credentials. Second, he is presently a former FBI counterterrorism agent, so that he is less likely to be taking his marching orders from his superior officers. The key term here is “less likely,” but this does not mean “necessarily.” For example, some so-called “military analysts” are really former government officials hired by the government to appear on talk shows to spread government propaganda.25
