The Manipulative Society

The Manipulative Society

People supposedly seek facts, the truth, whatever. They do so to understand their situation, quite naturally: who wouldn't want to understand the situation they were in, what could threaten them, what might be to their advantage? So does society, which is what individuals collectively form, help or hinder that understanding? Currently, in the UK as often elsewhere, I conclude that it does not. Society, which is simply a collective of individuals in a given area, seems to me to conspire against the individual's goal of achieving understanding of their own situation. How can that be and why; why should society conspire against its own constituents; who could benefit from that?

I believe the problem lies in the area of the facts, the truth whatever. These are crucial to an individual's understanding of their situation. In a democratic society, the individual has a vote; how can that individual place that vote so that it reflects their interests if they don't have the information to know what those interests are? So who, and with what resources, is going after the information they need?

There are branches of Academe designed specifically to seek them. Philosophy is one seeker after truth but, after Wittgenstein, there's probably not a lot of hope there. Science is another. The problem with science is that it is (understandably) shy of facts. It is a popular fallacy that science establishes facts; what science will say is that a given proposition accords with all known facts or evidence but yet may not, in a genuinely universal, extra galactic, context, be true. Nonetheless, science is very good at showing what is demonstrably not true or liable to be false.

How does that help truth seekers? Not a lot, but it does expose fantasies, and it must be said that the resources behind such endeavours are not very considerable.

What about the other side, the side that might like to obscure facts and the truth, for gain of some sort? Well, there is the whole of the huge advertising and publicity industries for example, whose sole purpose is to persuade and to sell, whatever the facts of the matter. They legitimately sell, by popular consent, cars, toothpaste, soap or whatever, but also what else? Truth is irrelevant to them but they do deal in fantasies. Then there is the huge media industry, whose function is supposedly not just to entertain but also to inform. So what information should the media give? The facts (as currently known)? That is possible but virtually all the media are owned by people who have views and agendas. So why shouldn't they express their opinions and try to implement their agendas through their media, for their own gain? As of course they do. So we have a society in which resources are largely geared not to truth and facts but to manipulation and individual gain. The owners of the manipulative industries can (and do?) persuade individuals to act against their own individual interest.

Where does that leave the individual trying to assess their own situation, looking for facts, truth? I think that leaves the individual very much on their own, with only their own brain to assess the almost certainly biased information being fed to them. “Society” can offer no help. Probably their only help is the realisation that what is being fed to them as ”true” information is almost certainly biased. Does the society's educational system help, teach people to think for themselves? Or does it teach them to think and learn by rote? I think these are questions that any healthy society, any society that values the welfare of its citizens, should ask itself. And so should the citizens themselves.