For quite some time, I’ve struggled to understand the social and psychological dynamics behind social atrocities like rising fascism and oligarchy, ever-increasing economic inequality, and the disintegration of the free press and the very idea of ‘truth.’
It’s been challenging. Today, we’re all subjected to an overwhelming ‘firehose to the face’ of too much information (and disinformation!) and endless ‘news’ — most of it bad. It’s been almost impossible to keep up or effectively ‘process’ what’s happening.
Finally, I realized that this massive ‘overwhelm’ is quite intentional. Bad actors, racists, greed-heads, and authoritarians around the globe have figured out exactly how to overwhelm the rest of us, maximize their impact and power, and confuse/bully us into submission. They’ve figured out how to use the global Internet and our societies’ laws, institutions, and freedoms against us.
I know these statements sound rather paranoid, but they’re not. They are backed up by facts and the recent historical record — as I will show. There is an actual, factual war on consciousness and conscience consuming our world, especially in the U.S., and it is increasingly affecting — and undermining — almost every aspect of our lives.
Since this vast, ongoing ‘war’ is SO comprehensive and overwhelming, I will focus on just a few recent social patterns that reveal the overall ‘game plan.’ I’ll focus on three accelerating, devastating processes: 1) growing attacks on social awareness, conscience, and ‘wokeness’; 2) undermining the very idea of ‘truth’ and destroying trust in elections and the press; and 3) intensifying attacks on science, medical research, vaccines, and global climate science.
This is not anywhere close to an exhaustive listing, but it will illustrate my main point. These patterns show exactly how our ‘modern’ world is being eviscerated and eroded from within. They show how we are truly embroiled in a vast war on both conscience and consciousness.
Growing attacks on social awareness, conscience, and ‘wokeness’
This bizarre pattern has been growing in both power and global ‘reach’ over the past decade, but its effects are most evident in the U.S. It’s a deeply insidious and dangerous pattern because it targets both consciousness and conscience and works to disable both. Amazingly, it’s now become ‘fashionable’ to mock social awareness and caring, attack empathy and loving compassion as ‘too woke,’ and work to revoke or cripple all ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) efforts.
What is really going on here? The racist overtones are clear, but it goes far beyond that. This is a concerted, multi-pronged attack on modern values like equality, social justice, economic fairness, and healthy social diversity. In effect, the ongoing attacks on DEI and ‘wokeness’ are saying — insisting — something like: ‘Our American ideals of equality, equal justice, and equal opportunity are grossly unfair to Whites, so we (Whites) have to band together to oppose them.’
This malicious rightwing ‘program’ aims to totally remake modernity. It aims to reinstate White supremacy and ensure that minorities — and even women — remain second-class citizens. To achieve this result, these insurgents are working tirelessly to turn our morality upside-down, degrade and disable our inner conscience, and paralyze our moral compass.
Imagine: today millions of Americans see diversity, economic equity, and social inclusion as bad; they are derided as evil ideals promoted by horrible ‘radical socialists.’
Uh, not so! These ideals are ‘All-American.’ They are written into our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, and form much of the basis of our ‘freedom’ and ‘land of the free.’ All the bad actors, racists, and authoritarians will never admit they hate and oppose these American ideals — but their actions and legislative priorities reveal the real truth.
Of course, none of their plans could reach fruition if people’s inner morality and compassion are strong and fully functional — so undermining and destroying these crucial human attributes is an essential prerequisite. A healthy conscience is a major impediment to their plans and has to go. Then, a clear path opens up for these social manipulators to replace empathy and moral considerations with growing resentment, hate, racism, and misogyny.
That’s one of the horrid aims of their protracted ‘war on consciousness and conscience.’ They seek to amplify our unconscious fears and hatreds and lock us into dark, desperate mindsets that help them gain control and retain power.
These power-hungry, amoral manipulators are truly traitors to humanity and to all that is good or noble within us. They believe it’s far better to be unconscious, enraged, merciless, and without cumbersome distractions like empathy or conscience. (There’s even a recent movement against empathy within many American evangelical churches! That’s how far we’ve already sunk.)
Undermining the idea of ‘truth’ and destroying trust in elections and the press
This process is crucial to the destabilization and eventual takeover of society. As with most of these intentionally destructive processes, this one began with seemingly innocent ‘questioning’ regarding the accuracy of elections and the news reported by the press and media. It quickly morphed, however, into an all-out assault on both elections and the media, with Mr. Trump and right-wing ideologues and commentators all jumping on the ‘widespread fraud’ and ‘fake news’ bandwagons.
Trump, in particular, has turned ‘fake news’ and ‘fraudulent elections’ into household terms.
It’s hard to overestimate the destructive impacts of these assaults. It’s no small feat to undermine and effectively destroy a huge nation’s trust in its elections, the media, and its ‘free press.’ It is not an exaggeration to say that destroying this trust is THE central pillar of the entire ‘war’ on consciousness and conscience.
Plus, such a major reversal leads directly to the disintegration of many people’s moral compass. Over and over, people are told not to trust election results… or the authorities or government… or the ‘fake news’ media. These devious ‘truths’ get repeated endlessly until people give in; their minds and values are reshaped, and they come to trust exactly the wrong people: those who manipulate them with bad intent.
Even worse, this entire process of turning truth on its head, fraudulently yelling (endlessly) about widespread fraud, and constantly branding real news and truth as ‘fake’ dismantles people’s trust in truth and reality itself. Trump and other far-right politicians have no qualms about degrading or even wrecking Americans’ trust in truth, elections, and our free press — if it helps them achieve their selfish, subversive goals.
Again, if they can destroy or somehow remove folks’ common sense, reasoning abilities, and earned trust, then anything becomes possible. If they can make the very foundations of democracy, freedom, and our free press seem fraudulent or ‘fake’, that opens the door for them to replace such trust and openness with hate, racist values, resentment, and deep, deep paranoia.
All these changes work totally to their advantage — by design.
Photo by Daniel Páscoa on Unsplash
Intensifying attacks on scientific research, vaccines, public health programs, and global climate science
Where do I even begin? Anti-science, anti-vaccine, and anti-climate-science messaging has been a cornerstone of far-right politics and media programming (thanks for nothing, Fox ‘News’!) for over a decade now. Meanwhile, Trump and his administration consistently do everything possible to undermine, hamstring, or outright reject science and scientists.
Remember how Trump dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic? Initially, he took it seriously and initiated ‘Project Warp Speed’ to quickly develop a good vaccine. And the dedicated scientists did it. It was almost miraculous. But then, Trump reversed course, started dissing or making fun of vaccines and people who got shots or wore masks, and generally undermined our entire pandemic response.
What happened next? Over 1.12 million people died, which is by far the highest death toll for any nation on the planet. Trump and his obedient minions directly influenced many millions of people to not take COVID-19 seriously, and even encouraged them to scorn those who did — with widespread and deadly results.
More recently, since Trump 2.0 began in January, Trump, Musk and his DOGE ‘muskrats,’ and Trump’s new, even more obedient minions have worked tirelessly to gut and downsize the CDC, NIH (National Institutes of Health), FEMA, the NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Weather Service), and almost all climate-related research and funding. It’s not a stretch to say that Trump and his team are going out of their way to reject and ‘cancel’ anything related to climate change and climate studies.
Think about that. Manmade climate disruptions are the most serious threat facing humanity — according to even Pentagon studies — yet we now have an entire political party, the GOP, and our president and the massive federal apparatus he commands actively denying the threat of climate change and doing their best to make it just ‘go away.’
They seem to believe that, if they can just remove the evidence, the scientists, their climate-study programs, and the factual information they generate, then the whole problem somehow disappears.
But I’ve got news for them — real news, not ‘fake’ news. Climate change is real, it’s accelerating and intensifying, and their idiotic denial and suppression of truth is pushing humanity in exactly the wrong direction. It’s pushing us toward total inaction; worse, it’s pushing us to ‘drill, baby, drill,’ increase our fossil fuel use, and make matters far worse.
Rejection of and contempt for science and scientific knowledge is a death knell for any ‘modern’ society — and as climate change/disruption intensifies, may prove to be the death knell for civilization itself. Contempt for science and accurate, timely information is utterly incompatible with liberal democracy, modernity, and maintaining the economies and modern ‘comforts’ we now take for granted.
That’s why Trump and his fellow ‘social arsonists’ are conducting such a vicious anti-science purge. Contempt for scientific knowledge is a sure precursor of societal disintegration and collapse. And such a widespread collapse directly serves their dark goals and intentions, allowing them to seize ever greater control.
We face the rapid unraveling of civilization and human consciousness
All three of these vicious, destructive processes revolve around suppressing awareness, empathy, conscience, and consciousness. Instead, they directly support UNreason, fear, racist hate, misogyny, and other vile social trends.
They often mask themselves as ‘righteous’ and ‘rational,’ but nothing could be further from the truth. These dark, intentional processes keep creating and intensifying a lasting loss of faith in reason, caring, democracy, equalitarian ideals, media truth-telling, and the very idea of truth itself.
All of these processes are happening simultaneously, and in combination, are having their desired dire effects. These bad actors, racists, tyrants, demagogues, and right-wing haters are having a field day, all at our and our civilization’s expense. They are rapidly undermining and destroying centuries’ worth of social and scientific advances. They are quickly destroying our basic trust in fundamental institutions and processes like the press, science, and democracy.
They are even destroying the very notion of ‘truth.’
It’s no exaggeration to say we’re locked in a war over consciousness and the human conscience. And scarily, today the forces supporting UNawareness, unconsciousness, non-empathy, and hatefulness are winning out — at least, in the short term.
It remains to be seen if we can collectively rise to this challenge, reassert our essential humanity, and overcome these greedy, malevolent forces and factions.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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