by Mickey Huff
We are simply flawed units to be prompted into spending more and costing the state less. The propaganda lies not only in the political-corporate manipulation of the public but also—most insidiously—in the way this is cloaked in the language of ideology-free empiricism and the semblance of autonomy: the idea that people are being nudged “to make better decisions for themselves” . . . Behaviour change—the “new science of irrationality,” “neuro-economics,” or “nudge”—claims that since people often fail to act rationally and in their best interests, their decisions and behaviour should be guided subconsciously by (rational) experts.4
In the years leading up to this microcosmic effort to harness reason, individuals and institutions achieving legitimacy in the public mind have long been recognized as holding a monopoly on the capacity to reason and are thus perceived as the foremost bearers of truth and knowledge. Through the endorsement of “experts”—figures perceived as authoritative in their field—the public is still easily persuaded on many matters, from genetically modified foods and water fluoridation, to terrorist attacks at home and military intervention abroad.
THE PUBLIC USES OF REASON
To a significant degree, reason is defined one-dimensionally, its relationship to truth largely taken-for-granted. Yet, as Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz observed, reason marks our humanity, suggesting a portion of the soul capable of a priori recognition of truth. “Only reason can complete the happiness of the other virtues,” political philosopher J. S. McClelland similarly remarked, “and reason does this partly through its relationship with the other faculties and partly through the pursuit of the true knowledge which is its own.”5
With this in mind, the modern individual in the mass has been rendered at least partially soulless—devoid of self-knowledge—through her everyday deferral to the powerfully persuasive notion and representation of expertise that now extends to the subtle and voluntary dynamic of new media “interactivity.” However narrowly focused, under the guise of objectivity, the institutionally affiliated journalist, academic, bureaucrat, and corporate spokesperson have in many instances become the portals of reason through which the public is summoned to observe “truth.”
The human capacity to exercise reason and seek truth is further sidetracked and rerouted through a routine parade of news stories that are almost entirely divorced from political processes bearing upon the human condition and its historical trajectory. For example, the extensive media coverage afforded the trials of Jodi Arias or O. J. Simpson are platforms for applying human reason to events that have little bearing on truly critical affairs of the day. The news media’s censorial tendency may be illustrated along these lines by noting how comparatively little news centers on significant trials that may allow the public to fathom the plausible cloak-and-dagger tactics of the US military–industrial–intelligence complex—specifically the legal proceedings for apparent Tucson Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner, alleged Aurora Colorado assassin James Holmes, the would-be Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, or especially Pfc. Bradley Manning in the case of WikiLeaks. The fallout from such momentous and highly questionable public events are repeatedly deemed unworthy for public consideration, while the myths fabricated to define their official meaning and significance are uniformly accepted through corporate media’s carefully coordinated repetition and omission of select facts.
The understanding and application of reason is also crucial not only as a basis for assessing facts and recognizing these from the narrative and visual forms presenting themselves as news, but also to distinguish human reason from the surface rationality of bureaucratic and technological systems imposed on human activity. This is a fundamental problem of modern social relations that finds its firmament in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theories of the press, continuing through to the present as new media technologies further strengthen the social and political myths invented for the masses.6
The prevailing myth of terrorism as an existential threat to the Western world suggests the continued abandonment of reason and moves toward what Erich Fromm called the automaton, what C. Wright Mills referred to as “cheerful robots,” and what David Riesman termed the “other-directed” impulse. Dissent—the desire to exert one’s humanity and freedom through the application of reason to available facts—is often an unacceptable violation of the prevailing political rationality where fear and terror are prime motivators.7
The pressures to conform and restrain the use of reason are today often reinforced through a turn to scientific inquiry—particularly psychiatry and psychology—to rationalize and defend official accounts of public events. For example, some psychologists contend that “a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview,” a New York Times opinion piece argued. “While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief.”8
Such social science seeks to deny the individual’s inherent possibility for apprehending truth and exercising intellectual agency by locating the causes of unorthodox thought and expression in presumed biological aberrations. This is readily apparent in the news media’s quest to label forbidden political thought not conforming with official accounts as “conspiracy theory,” with the attendant suggestion that consideration of unofficial accounts of important public events may indicate mental illness.9
This is an explicit move to not only augment the perceived rationality of corporate and state institutions that undergird civil society, but also to short circuit the effort to apprehend reality and assert the very human impulse toward the exercise of reason that affirms one’s own freedom and being.10 As Erich Fromm noted, in terms of evolutionary advances humanity has traveled a long biological road to arrive at objectivity—“that is, to acquire the faculty to see the world, nature, other persons and oneself as they are, and not distorted by desires and fears. The more man develops this objectivity, the more he is in touch with reality, the more he matures, the better can he create a human world in which he is at home.”
For Fromm, the underlying element to apprehend in the rediscovery and expansion of a truly sane society has much more to do with the cultivation and exercise of reason than intelligence since the former distinguishes the human being’s inclination toward truth. Fromm continued,
Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.11
Along these lines, Immanuel Kant infers how, aside from property ownership the ability to publicly exercise one’s reason is a cornerstone of citizenship. In a well-known political essay, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” he argues that human beings can overcome their intellectual immaturity only through the “public use of reason” whereby they may reach further insight through the guidance of other reasoning minds. Without the public display of ideas the truth will likely remain obscure.12
Indeed, at no point in modern Western society is there a greater need for the public application of reason to current affairs than today, although the ability to publicly exercise reason is often confused with the notion of doing as one wishes or deciding between a preset array of options. C. Wright Mills argued:
Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them—and then, the opportunity to choose. . . . That is why freedom cannot exist without an enlarged role of human reason in human affairs. Within an individual’s biography and within a society’s history, the social task of reason is to formulate choices, to enlarge the scope of human decisions in the making of history. The future of human affairs is not merely so
me set of variables to be predicted. The future is what is to be decided—within the limits, to be sure, of historical possibility. But this possibility is not fixed; in our time the limits seem very broad indeed.13
With this in mind, corporate news media’s de facto safeguarding of the public sphere against nonconformist thought and expression seeks to demarcate the nature and style of acceptable deliberation, and in so doing shape and define the trajectory of history itself. Along these lines, journalists and academics—civil society’s ostensible representatives and guardians of reason—are often complicit in reason’s negation.
As instruments of state-sanctioned rationality, such agents are largely bereft of emotion, moderate in temperament, and speak or write in predictably formulaic tones. The narratives they relate and play out present tragedy and strife with the expectation of certain closure. And with a century of commercial media programming, the mass mind has come to not only accept but anticipate such regulation and control under the regime of institutionally sanctioned expertise.
This preservation of what passes for reason and truth cannot be sustained without a frequent dialectical struggle with unreason and falsity. Since many individuals have unconsciously placed their true reasoning faculties in abeyance and often lack a valid knowledge of politics and history, their unspoken faith in government and the broader political economy to protect and further their interests is unjustified. Against this milieu, those genuinely capable of utilizing their reasoning capacities in the pursuit of truth are often held up as heretical for their failure to accept what is presented as reality inside existing sociohistorical horizons, with the requisite “conspiracy theory” label wielded in Orwellian fashion to denote such nonconforming intellectual activity.
When lacking the autonomous use of reason to recognize truth, as well as a historical consciousness to render existing phenomena meaningful, form often trumps substance. For example, a seemingly obscure news website with unconventional graphics or an emotional news presenter purporting to discuss the day’s affairs is typically perceived as untrustworthy and illegitimate by a public conditioned to accept forms of news and information where the appearance of objectivity and professionalism often camouflage disinformation.
CONSPIRACY PANICS: REASON VERSUS
POLITICAL RATIONALITY
An important way of understanding the corporate media’s broad domination of the public’s sociopolitical consciousness and enforcement of established political rationalities is the invocation of conspiracy and what cultural historian Jack Bratich terms “conspiracy panics.” Based on the sociocultural phenomenon of “moral panics,” the conspiracy panic model suggests how the public use of reason is disallowed from examining deep events, such as how the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or 9/11 are downplayed, manipulated, or wholly suppressed by mainstream channels of communication and culture.14
Potentially fostered by the coordinated actions of government officials or agencies and major news organs to generate public suspicion and uncertainty,15 a conspiracy panic is a demonstrable immediate or long-term reactive thrust against rational queries toward unusual and poorly understood events. To be sure, they are also intertwined with how the given society acknowledges and preserves its own identity—through “the management and expulsion of deviance.” Along these lines, the concept further suggests how the public use of reason typically succumbs to the prevailing political rationality, thereby upholding the myths and beliefs that perpetuate the given political status quo.
Consider how positing that one’s government may be partially composed of unaccountable criminal elements is cause for serious censure. Labeled “conspiracy theories” by a corporate media that prompt and channel emotionally laden mass consent, such perspectives are quickly dispatched to the memory hole lest they prompt meaningful discussion of the political prerogatives and designs held by a global power elite coordinating governments and broader geopolitical configurations.16
In the mythos of American exceptionalism, government intelligence and military operations are largely seen as being directed almost solely toward manipulation or coercion of unfortunate souls in foreign lands. To suggest otherwise, as independent researchers and commentators have done with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)–Contra–crack cocaine connection, and 9/11, has been cause for sustained conspiracy panics that act to suppress inquiry into such events by professional and credentialed opinion leaders, particularly journalists and academics.
At the same time, a conspiracy panic serves a subtle yet important doctrinal function of manifesting and reproducing the ideational status quo of the “war on terror” era. “The scapegoating of conspiracy theories provides the conditions for social integration and political rationality,” Bratich observed. “Conspiracy panics help to define the normal modes of dissent. Politically it is predicated on a consensus of ‘us’ over against a subversive and threatening ‘them.’”17 These days especially, the public suggestion that an official narrative may be amiss almost invariably puts one in the enemy camp.
CHALLENGING GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY NARRATIVES
The time for a conspiracy panic to develop has decreased commensurately with the heightened spread and availability of information and communication technology that allows for the dissemination of news and research formerly suppressed by the perpetual data overload of corporate media. Before the wide access to information technology and the Internet, independent investigations into events including the JFK assassination took place over the course of many years, materializing in book-length treatments that could be dismissed by intelligence assets in news media and academe as the collective activity of “conspiracy buffs”—amateurish researchers who lack a government or privately funded sinecure to overlook or obscure inquiry into deep events. The CIA directed media outlets and some key individuals to employ the term “conspiracy theorist” specifically to discredit publications and deter future inquiries into controversial, historical events.18
Not until Oliver Stone’s 1991 blockbuster film JFK, essentially an adoption of works by author Jim Marrs, Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, did a substantial conspiracy panic take shape as a response to such analysis thrust upon the public in popular narrative form. This panic arose from and centered around Hollywood’s challenge to traditional journalism’s turf alongside commercial news outlets’ typically deceptive interpretation of the event and almost wholly uncritical treatment of the Warren Commission Report.19
Shortly thereafter, investigative journalist Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series for the San Jose Mercury News demonstrated the Internet’s capacity to explain and document a government conspiracy. With Webb’s painstaking examination of the CIA’s role in the illicit drug trade hyperlinked to a bevy of documentation and freely distributed online, the professional journalistic community and its intelligence penumbra fell silent for months.
In the interim, the story picked up steam in the nontraditional outlets of talk radio and tabloid television, with African Americans especially intrigued by the potential government role in the crack cocaine epidemic. Then suddenly major news outlets spewed forth a vitriolic attack on Webb and the Mercury News that amazingly resulted in the Mercury’s retraction of the story and Webb’s eventual departure from the paper. Years later, Webb apparently committed suicide.20
Criticism of Webb’s work predictably focused on petty misgivings toward his alleged poor judgment—specifically his intimation that the CIA intentionally caused the crack epidemic in African American communities, an observation that many blacks found logical and compelling. So not only did Webb find himself at the center of a conspiracy panic because of his assessment of the CIA’s role in the drug trade; he was also causing mass “paranoia” within the African American community that major news media suggested were predisposed toward such thinking. Not incidentally, the CIA not only no longer denies Webb’s assertions, they have admitted,
though obfuscated, the degree of their involvement.21
Since the mid-1990s conspiracy panics have increasingly revolved around an effort by mainstream news media to link unorthodox political ideas and inquiry with violent acts. This dynamic was crystallized in Timothy McVeigh, the principal suspect in the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing, who through the propaganda-like efforts of government and major news media was constructed to symbolize the dangers of “extremist” conspiratorial thought (his purported fascination with white supremacism and The Turner Diaries) and violent terrorist action (the bombing itself). Conveniently overlooked is the fact that McVeigh was trained as a black ops technician and still in US Army employ at the time of his 2001 execution according to his death certificate.22
Through a broad array of media coverage and subsequent book-length treatments by the left intelligentsia on the “radical right,” the alleged lone wolf McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing became forever coupled in the national memory. The image and event seemingly attested to how certain modes of thought can bring about violence—even though McVeigh’s role in what took place on April 19 was without question one part of an intricate web painstakingly examined by the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee23 and in the 2011 documentary A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995.24
Independent researchers and alternative media utilizing the Internet have necessitated the rapid deployment of conspiracy panic-like reactions that appear far less natural and spontaneous than their predecessors to neutralize public debate and bolster often questionable official narratives of momentous and unusual events. For example, wide-scale skepticism surrounding the May 1, 2011, assault on Osama bin Laden’s alleged lair in Pakistan was met with efforts to cultivate a conspiracy panic evident in editorials appearing across mainstream print, broadcast, and online news platforms. The untenable event, supported only by President Obama’s pronouncement of the operation, was unquestioningly accepted by corporate media that shouted down calls for further evidence and alternative explanations of bin Laden’s demise as “conspiracy theories.”
