The Essence of Democracy... The Essence of Reality

Have We Forgotten What It Means 

to be Citizens of Democracy?

Democracy, by definition, Requires That

We See All Sides of Every Issue.

We have forgotten what it means 

to be human and to understand reality.

Being Human Requires an open mind 

that is seeking to understand; seeing all sides.

Remember: none of us is right, we are all wrong, 

because we are imperfect, puny human beings.

What is this clamoring that 

I AM RIGHT! THUS YOU ARE WRONG!?!?

All learning begins with the acknowledgement that I DON’T KNOW!

IF I ALREADY KNOW… I CAN NO LONGER LEARN.

If your understanding of this world comes from one source, then know this,

you do not understand this world.

A one-sided viewpoint is not real or true.

Bias is constantly distorting our thinking, 

every moment of every day.

Therefore when the “reality” I speak of comes only from 

my opinion, perspective, politics, beliefs, or bubble,

It is not reality. Opinions are opinions. Reality is reality.

Opinions are one-sided. Reality is all-sided.

Reality encompasses the complexity of all sides.

In a democracy, it is absolutely necessary to see all sides because NONE of us are right!

Democracy is built on the tension between opposite viewpoints.

The value of democracy is in the struggle of that tension.

Democracy never begins with the right answer, 

this world is far too complex for that.

It begins with the questions and the needs of the people. 

Better decisions are made beginning from diverse perspectives.

Otherwise it is an autocracy or dictatorship.

So when we narrow our source of reality to one perspective,

then we are no longer democratic.

We begin with diverse perspectives 

and then seek reconcilian through consensus of those perspectives, 

which gives better answers, solutions, and legislation. 

When we seek division and segregation,

Democracy is no more.

Then this great experiment fails.

It is clear that, in the state of dividedness we are in and that we apparently want, 

democracy has failed; until we begin to do the work of seeing the issues from all sides so we can reconcile differences enough to make democratic decisions. To begin, we must first admit that

if we are not seeking a balanced view,

then we are satisfied with a biased view.

We have forgotten that democracy is not about what “I want” or “I think” or “I believe”. It is not about the ideology and beliefs of any group. It is solely about the common good of “We the people”. All the people. It is not all about ME! Never has been. Never will be. Because then it is no more a democracy. The definition of autocracy is rule by one person with total power. Democracy is not ME-ocracy.

Unbalanced News

Recently I had a short political conversation with people that I care about. We sort of stumbled into it. Generally, I try to “not go there” because I know how different our understanding and experience of the world is. But here’s the gist of it.

Person one told a story about some military personnel that he saw in a news clip. We were all proud of what they had done. But then this person’s true feelings came out saying how upsetting it is that people do not appreciate our military. This is something he has been hearing on the news that was pointing fingers of false accusations at the “other side”. 

I didn’t follow up on that right away because I was puzzled and had no idea where that statement came from. I don’t know anyone that disrespects our people in the military.

As the conversation of current events continued, I too reiterated how I appreciate people in the military, even more so since I have had a son that spent 8 years in the Navy.

Person two then added a piece that brought out the whole story. She said that she just doesn’t understand how we can be taking down all of those monuments and “erasing America’s history” and dishonoring our military.

Whoa. That blew my mind and then I put the pieces together and asked if she knew anything about the monuments and statues that are being removed. She had no idea because all of her information comes from Fox News. They used the monuments to generate anger and hate toward the military by accusing the “other side” without telling the whole story. I explained that the only monuments that are being taken down are the civil war confederacy war heros. Then I explained that the confederacy was the enemies and traitors of the United States during the Civil War that killed more of our soldiers than all of the wars in America's history combined. These are monuments to the enemies of President Lincoln, our Congress, our government, and our Union Army that was fighting to uphold the new antislavery laws of America and to prevent the confederacy from splitting our country in two. Those monuments represent traitors, not heros, to the United states. It is mind boggled how they were even allowed to be put up since those monuments are what is dishonoring our soldiers in the civil war and all of those that died fighting for freedom and unity. It is like dishonoring our country by putting up monuments to Sadam Heusein after the Iraq war or of Hitler after WW2 or of Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 towers killed 2996 Americans. No! Unthinkable! We would never dishonor American history that way. Instead we honor our soldiers in each of those wars and we build a memorial to all of the people that lost their lives after 9/11 and each war.

The response was a very stunned and emotional reaction of, “I didn’t know that!” A while later I was asked what news they should watch. I gave a very lame answer that we must find a whole variety of perspectives so we understand the issues. But how in the world does the average person do that without doing hours of research??? I realized that even though I spend an hour or two per day trying to understand the news, I have some work to do to organize my own news gathering in a way that I can give a not-so-lame answer.

Tools for Serious Citizens of Democracy

Instead of only seeking out news that says what we want it to say, we must seek out news sources that give us multiple perspectives on every issue. It is obvious that we all understand our own perspectives and opinions. What we are ignorant of is what other people are thinking and seeing and believing.

Here is an option to consider, if you are serious about being a good citizen of democracy. I’m sure there are more tools like this out there. I’ll keep looking and will post anything I find that seems valuable to this blog post.

All Sides -- Unbiased Balanced News This gives you news from all sides. Each issue presented by news sources that are labeled as Left -- Center -- Right. It makes it easy to understand “all sides” of the issues which is what is needed if we would like to be a healthy democracy rather than the failed democracy that we are now. It also gives you media bias ratings and charts that show how reliable and how biased a news source tends to be. These ratings are constantly being updated by those that use the sight, ordinary citizens like you and me.

There are two convenient ways to stay connected.

1. There is an email list that is sent every week listing a whole variety of news articles. It is on the front page of the website toward the top All Sides -- Unbiased Balanced News 

2. There is also a list of social media sites where you can “like” all sides on facebook https://www.facebook.com/AllSidesNow,  twitter https://twitter.com/AllSidesNow, and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/allsidesnow/.  

I’ve been using All Sides more lately but before that I spent about an hour a day going through 8 to 10 news sources, reading the headlines, and then digging into the issues of interest. This is not a very efficient way of doing it but I knew I had to do something, anything, other than getting stuck on one perspective. I use my phone and download all the news apps that I want to keep up with and then set the notifications so I can review them quickly or more in depth. Notifications on the phone then pop up throughout the day so I can keep up.

Confirmation Bias

One of the reasons we find it so hard to get out of our ingrained ways of thinking is that our thinking is naturally and automatically geared toward confirmation bias. We see and listen to the things that confirm what we already believe or know. Why? 

Nobody wants to be wrong even though they are not right.

Everyone wants to be right even though they are wrong.

We are stuck in a deep seated problem of our own thinking.

The only way out of this is to daily force ourselves to think and see different.

Reality must be seen from all sides. One-sided reality is not reality. It may be illusions and lies, propaganda and conditioning; but it is not true or real.

It takes constant daily effort to get unstuck, to see beyond the end or our own noses.

I call this practice: discerning truth. It is a lot of work; both inner work and outer work. Internal and external. Confirmation bias is coming at us from every direction; the left and the right, inside us and outside us, above and beneath. Discerning truth is a discipline that is spiritual, individual, social, religious, political; a democratic discipline that is required for citizens of democracy so it will not continue to fail.

I see two main reasons that we are like this.

1. Our drive to be right and certain is all encompassing and overpowering. How often do you want to be right in a disagreement, whether you are right or not, especially in the middle of the night. Our brains are constantly seeking domination above the “other” or the “different”. It is a survival instinct left over from ages past. We learned to fear the other, which is anything that is different. Because we fear that which we don’t understand.

2. We want to think we know it all. But our limited thinking cannot contain all of reality or all of truth. Our puny minds think they can but we are nothing but a grain of sand in this universe. It is our own fallibility and lack of perfection that often subconsciously eats away at us. And so we keep looking for anything and everything that will confirm our biases, opinions, beliefs, viewpoints, and thinking. Little do we know that thought is the culprit. David Bohm, a quantum physicist that also studies and wrote books about language, communication, and thought made a statement that keeps going deeper and deeper in me. “Thought creates the world, then says, ‘I didn’t do it!’”

Like it or not, 

we are hardwired to be wrong; 

unless we do the inner work it takes to discern truth. 

Like it or not, 

we see only what we want to see, 

we hear only what we want to hear, 

we see only what we are looking for, 

we hear only what we are listening for.

This is who we have become through conditioning and a myriad of influences that are shaping us. 

This is not who we are or who we are meant to be.

Seeing one-sided reality is the way of ignorance and laziness. 

Do we not want to understand what is real?

“Each of us creates a picture of our world by connecting a dozen or so of the trillions of dots that would need to be connected to make a ‘true’ portrait of the universe.” — Sam Keen

See Opinionation

Storytime: This parable illustrates a truth; 

a lesson so simple, so obvious, so prevalent, so familiar.

So familiar that we cease noticing it. 

So simple that yes, we can get unstuck 

and learn to see all sides.

Shamefully, America is acting like we are all blind and ignorant and yet yelling about being right, when really we are stuck in the muck of our one perspective just like the blindmen and the elephant. 

We are stubborn and too lazy to relearn and rehumanize so we can be citizens in a democracy again, so we can be human again.

One-sided democracy is nothing but an autocracy.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) 

It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, 

Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind), 

That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. 

The First approached the Elephant, And happening to fall 

Against his broad and sturdy side, At once began to bawl: 

"God bless me! but the Elephant Is very like a WALL!" 

The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, "Ho, what have we here, 

So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear 

This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a SPEAR!" 

The Third approached the animal, And happening to take 

The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake: 

"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a SNAKE!" 

The Fourth reached out an eager hand, And felt about the knee 

"What most this wondrous beast is like Is mighty plain," quoth he: 

"'Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a TREE!" 

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said: "E'en the blindest man 

Can tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can, 

This marvel of an Elephant Is very like a FAN!" 

The Sixth no sooner had begun About the beast to grope, 

Than seizing on the swinging tail That fell within his scope, 

"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant Is very like a ROPE!" 

And so these men of Indostan Disputed loud and long, 

Each in his own opinion

Exceeding stiff and strong, 

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!

Here are additional comments made by James Baldwin regarding this parable: 

“Then the elephant moved on. The six blind men sat by the side of the road all day, and talked to each other about what they thought it looked like. They could not agree, and called each other bad names for thinking something different. 

“Each believed that he knew the answer, but all were wrong because they only knew part of the truth. People who have eyes sometimes act just as foolishly.”

Anger and wrongness can be a powerful point of learning

As I realize that all of life is my teacher, one of my greatest teachers is my own hot buttons, my points of defendedness that evoke surprising, emotional reactions. 

Often I stand there puzzled and confused asking myself, did I just do that or say that?

I feel it in my heart and in my stomach, especially in the middle of the night. And I’m learning that these buttons are my own areas of insecurity, uncertainty, and dissonance. They seem to be cracks in my facade. But isn’t THAT where the light gets in???

Anytime we desperately want something to be true, that is when we must be most suspect and most skeptical knowing how strong our drive to be right is. Confirmation bias is a formidable force that works in the shadows of our lives, constantly distorting truth. This is why discerning truth is so hard and so critical.

Whenever an ideology, political or religious, becomes elevated above human beings, it is an idolatrous elevation.

"The human longing for certainty in an uncertain world perhaps accounts for the idolatrous way in which some treat certain religious symbols.". (Jan M. Long)

"There is no real certainty until you burn; 

if you wish for this, 

sit down in the fire.”

— Rumi

You can lead a human to knowledge, but you can’t make it think!

“We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools.” (ML King)

As Khalil Gibran wrote:

The sphinx spoke only once and said, “A desert is a grain of sand and a grain of sand is a desert ….let all else be silent.” Which means (despite our limited view) that as we begin to understand our slice of life, we also begin to understand life itself and vice versa.

 

Alternative Reality

 

Do You See Reality as it is? OR

Does Your Worldview Create an Alternative Reality?

Or is it your information source that is preventing you from understanding people that are different and stopping you from hearing their voices, thereby altering your worldview? How can we understand our world if we do not listen? And how can we listen if we have a political, cultural, religious, or any other agenda; or if we have the same biases that our information sources have? Do we listen to a wide variety of media sources so that we can be less biased? We cannot discern the truth of reality if we allow ourselves to be spoon fed and told what to think. Discernment takes work! A lot of work! Daily work! There is so much misinformation flying at us everyday, every moment, that if we do not pay attention, we end up swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. Our world becomes a world that has been conjured up by the propaganda and misinformation that other more powerful people want you to think. It is a form of brainwashing.

Does Truth Matter? Is it of ultimate importance to see reality as it is?

Do You Know What Your Worldview is? How do you know it is true?

No one sees the world as IT IS. They see the world as THEY ARE.

How Can Different People See Things Completely Different?

One reason is that we are all different whether we like it or not. That is the way of the world, the way of being human, and has been since the very beginning of humankind. If I see an event at the same time that you see it, we are both going to have different versions of the story. And as we listen to more different versions of the story, a more and more accurate version emerges. 

Why do we see things differently?

1. The physical environment may cause us to see something from a different perspective or angle, left or right, below or above.

2. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. How we were raised, when we were raised, where we were raised, literally our zip code, whether we went to church or not, what church we went to, the schools we went to, the books we read, the tv we watch; all of these form the set of values and beliefs that we adopt; these are all influences on how we see the world. Our culture, the media, tv shows, fashion, popularity, our craving for what we don’t have, our class, race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, our age, our education level, our education type, the perspective of those around us; our family and peer group, and on and on. All of this falls under what can be called our conditioning which starts the day we are born and is nurtured into us; very deliberately. This is how we all raise our kids. There is no end to the influences that shape our world and life view. Some people would like to say that their worldview comes from their religion, beliefs, creed, theology. But as you can see, it is much bigger than that. People in the same church that profess to be the same in their thinking and beliefs often live very different lives with very different associations, all of which shape how we see everything.

3. The way we interpret what we see with our minds is different for all people. That’s why we need each other and each other’s differences and perspectives. It helps us get a more complete and accurate picture of things. And this is the only way democracy could ever work.

4. But there are very subtle things that change our perspectives and interpretations.

1. We each live in our own bubble. Often we choose our bubble out of our lust for sameness. We feel more comfortable, safe, and secure with those that think like us, look like us, believe like us, smell like us ;). So in order to expand our perspectives, we must expand our bubble to include more and more diversity. Otherwise, we become like a race horse wearing blinders so that it can look in only one direction, straight ahead, and can’t see the rest of the world. For the horse, it helps when it is racing and someone is riding it but if a horse is running free and tries to cross a road with blinders on, it is very dangerous. For human beings, it limits our understanding, knowledge, and wisdom that requires different experiences. We lose a holistic view of the world by shutting out 99% of the world. We are setting ourselves up to be blindsided by life, realities of which we are unaware. If we wish to care about others and our world, we must open our minds and hearts to include as much as we can. For more thoughts, see https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/the-bubble-of-indifference/  

2. Expanding our bubble and experiences helps us refine the lens through which we see the world. We all have a worldview. Those of us that are loving, see the world as a loving place but those that are hostile see the world as a hostile place. We don’t see the world as it is. We can only see the world as WE ARE. Wisdom comes from the discipline of being aware of our conditioning and all of the things that have shaped our ways of seeing other people and the world. Unfortunately, this is our destiny as humans: “Each of us creates a picture of our world by connecting a dozen or so of the trillions of dots that would need to be connected to make a ‘true’ portrait of the universe.” (Sam Keen). Fortunately, through discipline and discernment, we can see reality more clearly, more deeply, and with a more full understanding. We all have a world and life view that we see everything through. But do we know what it is and how it shapes everything? If we can’t learn to learn from differences, then we will continue to live in an alternative reality even if we are neighbors. For more thoughts, see https://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-world-life-view-new-story-emerging.html 

3. It is interesting that your zip code often determines your beliefs, values, and view of the world. That is because parents teach kids to be like themselves, think like themselves, and see the world in the same way. This is because children have very little capacity for discernment on their own, especially when it comes to the more abstract things of this world. So children tend to get their view of the world from a single source or similar sources. They have little choice in the matter. And that’s the way we like it. It keeps them safe and secure. When we were children, we thought like a child, but when we grow up, we must learn to expand our perceptions and perspectives by cultivating a wide diversity of information sources and thus perspectives from this very complex world. A very important part of maturing is to realize that this world does not revolve around me anymore. So many adults in this world are still being spoon fed and told what to think, how to act, what to do, without doing the hard world of developing their own worldview, including values, beliefs, and perspectives. And rarely does education from any source teach us how to think and how to see. This should be one of education’s highest ideals and priorities. Too many adults refuse to do the hard work of maturing and growing up; doing the hard and endless work of discernment. We are second hand people, stuck in childhood. I think we live in a very lazy world that does not cultivate their own lifelong learning.

4. The alarming thing about getting your truth from one source is that we drift further away from each other. We know that no one person has perfect knowledge. In the same way, no one news source is right. None of us are right. None of us know all. That might not be as big a problem in a fascist dictatorship or religion where a strong man tells you what to think, what to do, what to say. But the brilliance of the democratic experiment that we live in is that it sustains itself by embracing and debating opposing views. It is the dialogue that brings us together. It is the diversity that sustains us. I’m worried that we are destroying America with alternative facts and realities and fear of difference to such an extent that we will never be able to function as citizens in this country, let alone as fellow citizens.

e. If you are serious about seeing the world as it is, it must begin with discernment. What is the source of your news and information? This is beginning of how your worldview is shaped. Check out the Interactive Media Bias Chart that rates media as right, center, and left AND as how high and low they are in reliability and biased slant. https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/

For me it is heart wrenching to see fellow Americans engaged in an imaginary war against fellow Americans. When a person’s source of information about the world is singular, emotional, polemic, and provocative, employing a voice of disgust, grievance, and indignation turning one’s neighbors, family members, and friends into enemy combatants by constantly employing a new language that is highly politicized and weaponized with clear tactics of war through Labeling, Categorizing, Dehumanizing, and Eliminating everything that is different and disagreeable. Familiar words are used to brainwash by repeating over and over directly from their “ever-expanding lexicon: mob, invasion, infestation, Politically Correct (PC) police, Russiagate, deep state, Militant Socialist Movement (MSM), MS-13, socialist agenda, liberal agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) 

And following Trump’s lead even after he is gone, the derogatory, inflammatory lexicon continues on Fox News and among fellow American’s, as it continues to divide and destroy our democracy: alternate facts, alt-right, American carnage, America first, antifa, bigly, China virus, collusion, deep state, disinformation, enemy of the people, fake news, failing, false and misleading, hoax, lock her up, loser, maga, never trumper, destruction of norms, quid pro quo, libs, owning the libs, sad, triggered, unprecedented, witch hunt, woke, snowflakes, elites, control, enslave. 

I feel very insulted by the way our language has been taken over for division and destruction. I am not anyone’s label, ever. I know who I am and I don’t need you to tell me who I am. Because you don’t know who I am. We can’t read each other’s minds.

And don’t forget, THEY ARE ALL COMING FOR YOU, YOUR HOME, YOUR JOB, YOUR CHURCH, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR MONEY, EVERYTHING YOU VALUE!!!

While falsely accusing the “other side” of waging a war on Christmas, Christianity, white people, and meat; in reality they are waging war on democracy, civility, the voice of the people, and civil society.

Far too often people do not want to think for themselves, which is required in any democracy. 

They want others to do their thinking and then tell them what to think, believe, value, see, hear… 

It really doesn’t matter if it is an alternative reality, as long as it inflames their grievance and feeds their indignation.

A Worldview is created and shaped in two ways: 

• Internal Authority (First Hand Experience): We develop this by deep contemplation, research, and reflection over many years, culminating in well founded and well grounded conviction rooted in the bones of one’s inner authority. “Stillness is where you meet with the essence of things… In stillness we can begin to let go of external voices, stereotypes, and clichés that crowd out original, personal and internal voices. Those discordant outer voices fade away in stillness. Stillness is a place of rooting oneself in a much larger field of being.”(John Fox, Finding What You Didn’t Lose)

• External Authority (Second Hand Experience): By being spoon fed from an external source, telling people how to think and how to see their world through the eyes of others’ hidden agendas and political or religious propaganda. (See: My World & Life View: a new story emerging) 

Am I a Second Hand Person?

I realized that I no longer wanted to be a second hand person. I wanted to be my own person, an original person, a radical person rather than a cut-out, knock-off, or generic person.

"I have created mirrors in which I consider all the wonders of my originality which will never cease." 

(Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179)

Original comes from the root word meaning origin or source.

Original: directly from Latin originalis, from originem (nominative origo) "beginning, source, birth," from oriri "to rise" 

Radical: The Latin word radix means "root." This meaning was kept when the word radicalis came into English as radical. I.E. Returning to its Roots. 

How about you? Are you a second hand person?

“For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

“If I were foolish enough to give you a system and if you were foolish enough to follow it, you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming, accepting, and when you do that you have set up in yourself the authority of another and hence there is conflict between you and that authority. You feel you must do such and such a thing because you have been told to do it and yet you are incapable of doing it. You have your own particular inclinations, tendencies and pressures which conflict with the system you think you ought to follow and therefore there is a contradiction. So you will lead a double life between the ideology of the system and the actuality of your daily existence. In trying to conform to the ideology, you suppress yourself - whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are. If you try to study yourself according to another, you will always remain a secondhand human being.” (Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known)

Following is a very insightful and well researched article on the alternative reality intentionally created and nurtured by Fox News. How Fox News Became a Language 

First are a few excerpts that are quite staggering and dangerous to democracy. 

Following those is the full article I copied here since the Atlantic restricts access after so many articles each month:

“For the past five years, I’ve had a front row seat to the Trumpification of Fox and the Foxification of America,” Brian Stelter writes in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. Stelter, as a media correspondent and analyst, covers Fox for CNN. His book is deeply reported: For it, Stelter spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox, along with 180 former employees and other people with direct ties to the network. (“Fox did not cooperate with the book,” Stelter told The Washington Post, but he “was in frequent touch with Fox News spokespeople” for fact-checking and the like.) Many of Hoax’s revelations are shocking, even—especially—if you follow the network.

Fox really does function, Stelter suggests, as Trump’s presidential daily briefing. (The president reportedly once told the Fox legal analyst Andrew Napolitano: “Everything I know about the Constitution, I learned from you on Fox & Friends.”) And Fox really does serve as a kind of adviser to its most fervent fan. Trump, Stelter writes, “granted pardons because of Fox. He attacked Google because of Fox. He raged against migrant ‘caravans’ because of Fox. He accused public servants of treason because of Fox.”

Trump regularly lifts his tweets directly from Fox’s banners and banter. Last year, Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz counted the times the president tweeted something in direct response to a Fox News or Fox Business program. Gertz found 657 such instances—in 2019 alone. Fox hosts and producers use that power to manipulate the president. “People think he’s calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say,” a former producer on the show tells Stelter. “Hell no. It’s the opposite. We tell him what to say.”

Here is the full article:

DO YOU SPEAK FOX?

How Donald Trump’s favorite news source became a language

By Megan Garber

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020

You might have come across the articles (“I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.

Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.

Read: Trump is building a dystopia in real-time

Language, too, is a norm. It is one more shared fact of political life that can seem self-evident until someone like Trump, or something like Fox, reveals the fragility that was there all along. You might have observed, lately, how Americans seem always to be talking past one another—how we’re failing one another even at the level of our vernacular. In the America of 2020, socialism could suggest “Sweden-style social safety net” or “looming threat to liberty.” Journalists could suggest “a person whose job is to report the news of the day” or “enemy of the people.” Cancel culture could mean … actually, I have no idea at all what cancel culture means at this point. Fox, on its own, did not create that confusion. But it exacerbated it, and exploited it. The network turned its translations of the world into a business model. Every day, the most watched shows of the most watched cable network in the country—a prime-time destination more popular than ESPN—take the familiar idioms of American democracy and wear away at their common meanings. The result is disorientation. The result is mass suspicion. Like a vengeful God bringing chaos to Babel, Fox has helped to create a nation of people who share everything but the ability to talk with one another.

There’s an episode of the office that ends, as so many episodes of The Office do, with Jim playing a prank on Dwight. Dwight, who sells paper with the militant zeal he brings to everything else he does, wins a company-wide prize for his sales record. His reward is to give a speech at a corporate gathering. Dwight is nervous about this opportunity; Jim—here is where he stares directly at the camera—gives him some public-speaking advice. Fast-forward to Dwight, in a cavernous hotel ballroom, breathing heavily into the lectern’s microphone, pounding his fists, and shouting lines from the script Jim had provided him: the Googled speeches of famous dictators. Jim had turned Dwight into something he wasn’t; that was the prank. But the joke was that Jim had also turned Dwight into something he’d been all along. Dwight Shrute has what psychologists might refer to as an “authoritarian personality.” Jim had given him, in a roundabout way, the ability to become himself—dictator cosplay, no costume required. The crowd loved it.

I thought of Dwight while watching the first night of this year’s Republican National Convention—specifically, while watching Kimberly Guilfoyle deliver her own version of Dwight’s speech to living rooms across America. Guilfoyle, a Trump-campaign fundraiser, a sort-of daughter-in-law to the president, and a former Fox star, shouted her speech. She finger-pointed and fearmongered with a verve that might have been comical were it not also, in its Mussolinian menace, terrifying. Of Joe Biden and assorted other “cosmopolitan elites,” Guilfoyle said:

They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live. They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.

Guilfoyle’s script, like Dwight’s, was both wildly inappropriate and deeply revealing. It was also, at this point, familiar. Guilfoyle was speaking the language of Fox. Her warnings were lifted from the same text the network’s opinion hosts read from each evening: elites, control, enslave. Here was Fox’s defining monomyth—the you and the they, locked in unending combat—brought to party politics’ biggest stage.

If you weren’t a regular viewer of Fox, Guilfoyle’s speech, and the many others that followed it as the convention wore on, might have been nearly unintelligible. If you hadn’t been informed that inclusivity is “groupthink”; if you weren’t conditioned to understand that the definition of media is “the enemy”; if you hadn’t been aware that Democrats want to “destroy your families, your lives, and your future”—you might have been jarred by all of the vitriol. You might have found yourself wondering why, in the midst of a global pandemic that had sickened millions of Americans and claimed the lives of more than 170,000, the RNC was warning about the threats of “cosmopolitan elites.” You might also have wondered why, during the nation’s long-overdue racial-justice reckoning, the RNC gave airtime to a couple who brandished guns at peaceful protesters—or why, during an economic emergency that has cost millions of Americans their livelihoods, a teenager was trotted out to talk about cancel culture (“being canceled, as in annulled, as in revoked, as in made void”).

The speeches, yes, were distractions from the ground truths of our crises. But they also attempted another kind of control: They reveled in the power TV has to shape—and to limit—viewers’ empathies. Instead of describing the America that is, the Republican Party described the America that is manufactured, every day, on Fox. It used its platform to refight some of Fox’s fondest micro-wars. It told its viewers not to focus on the people who have died, or the many more who might, but instead to focus on themselves: Your freedom. Your future. Your America. Watching it all, I felt the familiar fog that descends when something is lost in translation, when someone talks about something you share—in this case, a country—using details that are unrecognizable. It was the same kind of haze that came when Trump, newly sworn in as president, coined American carnage to describe a nation where violent crime had been declining for decades. Do we live in the same America? the broken words whisper. Maybe not, the same words reply.

Read: How to look away

When scholars discuss the effects of propaganda, that dissonance is often what they talk about. Hannah Arendt described it in terms of cynicism: the mental exhaustion that, over time, can make people “think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” Masha Gessen, the great observer of modern autocracy, writes of a more generalized kind of dissolution: “When something cannot be described,” Gessen notes, “it does not become a fact of shared reality.” The fog can descend, as well, when words have had new meanings imposed on them. In George Orwell’s 1984, freedom is captivity, peace is war, truth is a lie. In his 2015 book How Propaganda Works, the philosopher Jason Stanley defines political propaganda as “the employment of a political ideal against itself.” He describes in particular how self-negating language can make for self-negating politics. “The most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda,” Stanley writes, “is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is used to mask an undemocratic reality.”

The fox news channel itself arose as a matter of negation: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, guided by the Nixonian notion that America’s “unelected elite” had amassed too much power, created the network in 1996 as a counterweight to the liberal bias that many conservatives saw in journalism writ large. But Fox’s initial project now reads as quaint. War is, at this point, Fox’s defining metaphor. Like the other outlets that both inspired Fox and were inspired by it—conservative talk-radio shows, Breitbart News and other websites—the network often processes the facts of the world as assorted weapons of war. On Fox, there are enemy combatants (Hillary Clinton, James Comey, “the Media,” Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mueller, Christine Blasey Ford, China, immigrants, Democrats) and there are allies. The sides are always clear. So is the cause.

Read: Sean Hannity is Trump’s shadow press secretary

“For the past five years, I’ve had a front row seat to the Trumpification of Fox and the Foxification of America,” Brian Stelter writes in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. Stelter, as a media correspondent and analyst, covers Fox for CNN. His book is deeply reported: For it, Stelter spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox, along with 180 former employees and other people with direct ties to the network. (“Fox did not cooperate with the book,” Stelter told The Washington Post, but he “was in frequent touch with Fox News spokespeople” for fact-checking and the like.) Many of Hoax’s revelations are shocking, even—especially—if you follow the network. Fox really does function, Stelter suggests, as Trump’s presidential daily briefing. (The president reportedly once told the Fox legal analyst Andrew Napolitano: “Everything I know about the Constitution, I learned from you on Fox & Friends.”) And Fox really does serve as a kind of adviser to its most fervent fan. Trump, Stelter writes, “granted pardons because of Fox. He attacked Google because of Fox. He raged against migrant ‘caravans’ because of Fox. He accused public servants of treason because of Fox.”

The leader and the news network speak, and enforce, the same language. Trump regularly lifts his tweets directly from Fox’s banners and banter. Last year, Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz counted the times the president tweeted something in direct response to a Fox News or Fox Business program. Gertz found 657 such instances—in 2019 alone. Fox hosts and producers use that power to manipulate the president. “People think he’s calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say,” a former producer on the show tells Stelter. “Hell no. It’s the opposite. We tell him what to say.”

But the manipulation flows in both directions. At Fox, Stelter reports, executives live in fear of angering the opinion hosts, who in turn live in fear of angering viewers—who of course have been made angrier by the hosts themselves. A former producer tells Stelter: “We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off.” Stelter’s sources describe “a TV network that has gone off the rails,” he writes. “Some even said the place that they worked, that they cashed paychecks from, had become dangerous to democracy.” A well-known commentator on the network tells Stelter: “They are lying about things we are seeing with our own eyes.” An anchor laments that “we surrendered to Trump. We just surrendered.” The capitulation has become so complete, and so widely recognized, that when a Fox news reporter actually questions the president, the questioning itself makes news.

Fox is fond of accusing its alleged enemies of “politicizing” the news; the irony is that politicizing the news is Fox’s most basic move. Take the network’s coverage of COVID-19 in the spring. The opinion shows often treated the pandemic not as a public-health emergency, but as a political threat to Trump—as a front in its ongoing war. The Fox host Pete Hegseth: “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The host Jeanine Pirro: “If you listen to the mainstream media, it's time to buy the family burial plot.” The language mocked, and minimized. Geraldo Rivera announced, baselessly, that if you could hold your breath for 10 seconds, that was a sign that you were COVID-free. On March 6, Fox’s longest-tenured medical analyst, Marc Siegel, told Hannity that “at worst, at worst-worst-case scenario, it could be the flu.”

Every news network struggled to understand the threat of the coronavirus in those early days. But Fox struggled much more. Stelter quotes several staffers who were ashamed and angry with the network’s coverage at a time when it was crucial for Americans to grasp the severity of the virus. “Hazardous to our viewers,” one told him. “Dangerous,” said another. “Unforgivable,” said another. And also hypocritical: Even as Fox was airing segments that downplayed the threat of the virus, Stelter reports, executives at Fox headquarters in Manhattan were ordering deep cleanings of their offices and making preparations for their talent to work remotely. On March 9, Stelter notes, Hannity poked fun at his favorite targets—Dems, the Media—for, he claimed, exaggerating the threat of the virus. “They’re scaring the living hell out of people, and I see it again as like, Oh, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” he said.

Nine days later? He was insisting that “we’ve never called the virus a hoax.”

War, in the field, rationalizes behavior that would be deemed immoral in times of peace. War, used as language, can amount to a similar kind of exceptionalism. If your side is the right side, you might do whatever it takes to make sure that your side keeps winning. You can justify a lot in the name of liberty. (The title of Hannity’s 2002 book, Manichaean and Mad Libbian at once, is Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.) One Fox & Friends staffer Stelter spoke with describes being upbraided for a particular piece of copy she’d written for the show: an update sharing the news that White Castle would begin to serve vegan burgers. The copy presented the introduction as a positive development. But that was wrong, the staffer was told: The new burgers were actually part of the “war on meat.”

A 2019 survey by the public religion research institute tracked the differences between “Fox News Republicans” and other Republicans who said Fox was not their primary news source. Of the Fox loyalists, 55 percent said that there was nothing the president could do to lose their approval. That figure helps to explain how Fox can serve the state even as it operates independently. The “home team” is a powerful thing. Peter Pomerantsev, the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, points out how cannily Fox employs the metaphor of the family in its packaging of its opinion shows: Bill O’Reilly, Pomerantsev told me, was for a long time the network’s cynical uncle. Tucker Carlson is the quirky cousin. Sean Hannity, meanwhile, is “the father coming home, ranting about this horrible world where the white man felt disenfranchised.” Familiarity, literally—this is the “strict father” model of political discourse, rendered as infotainment. The upshot, Pomerantsev noted, is a constructed world that is above all “very, very coherent.”

Earlier this summer, Tucker Carlson opined that Black Lives Matter is “not about Black lives” but about “left-wing mobs” who are trying to “cancel your rights.” He warned viewers to “remember that when they come for you.” Some advertisers left; Carlson stayed on the air. He stayed as audio surfaced of him referring to Iraqis, in 2006, as “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and saying, in 2008, that the Congressional Black Caucus existed to “blame the white man for everything.” He stayed after he claimed that immigration “makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Fox’s PR machine, when Carlson made that comment in late 2018, backed up its star: “It is a shame that left-wing advocacy groups, under the guise of being supposed ‘media watchdogs,’ weaponize social media against companies in an effort to stifle free speech.”

This is the paradox of a certain brand of propaganda. It is not the result of top-down efforts to capture hearts and minds; it is the result, instead, of a powerful entity responding to a powerful public. “No cable operator has ever seriously flirted with dropping Fox to save money,” Stelter notes, “because, among other reasons, they believe the right-wing backlash would cripple their business.” The president has his base; so does the network. That confers another kind of impunity. Fox can say whatever it wants with little consequence, save for, perhaps, higher ratings. One of the most sobering takeaways of Stelter’s reporting is that Fox foments fear and loathing not really because of a Big Brotherly impulse, but because the network has recognized that fear and loathing, as goods, are extremely marketable. In 2020, Stelter notes, Fox “is on a path to $2 billion in profits.”

And yet: You are under attack, Carlson tells his viewers, with his signature furrow of the brow. They are coming for you, he insists. Carlson does what he wants, and says what he wants, because he can. And he suggests that his audience, through the transitive powers of television, can enjoy a similar freedom from accountability. Critics might talk about Fox as an “information silo.” They might dismiss the network’s skewed stories as alternative realities. But even the insults, in their way, inoculate. They imply that Fox can do what it does in isolation. It cannot. Its outrages are atmospheric. Its definitions of the world are communal, even if they aren’t commonly shared. The events of 2020 have been tragic reminders of that. When cruelty is refigured as “free speech,” and when expertise becomes condescension—and when compassion is weakness and facts are “claims” and incuriosity is liberty and climate change is a con and a plague is a hoax—the new lexicon leaps off the screen. It implicates everyone, whether they speak the language or not.

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.

Also see:

Fox and the Big Lie: How Murdoch’s Fox News allowed Trump's propaganda to destabilise democracy | Four Corners Part 1.  (ABC is an Australian public broadcast service. Wikipedia) 

Fox and the Big Lie: Trump returns to campaign trail amid 'stolen election' lawsuits | Four Corners Part 2. (ABC is an Australian public broadcast service. Wikipedia)                 ABC Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxcrzzhQDj5zKJbXfIscCtg 

Big Think (video): How America Got Divorced from Reality: Christian Utopias, Anti-Elitism, Media Circus | Kurt Andersen  

The stories Fox News covers obsessively — and those it ignores — in charts

The scary alternative reality playing on Fox News

I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria

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'Fox News brain': meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news

Documentary:

The Brainwashing of My Dad Jen Senko, Matthew Modine, Frank Senko, Eileen Senko, Watch Movies & TV Online

Now This! 5 minute preview of the brainwashing of my dad.  How Fox News and Right-Wing Media Brainwashed This Dad and Destroyed a Family | Opinions | NowThis

Become Like a Child

Very interesting. Very powerful. Very understandable. 

Deconstructing our deeply ingrained beliefs means 

to become like a child first so that we can 

enter the kingdom of heaven, our worldview of reality,

which is within each of us.

We must begin with a clean slate, which is 

an open mind, an open heart, an open will.

This helps me put into words 

what I've been doing for 15 years.

Video: Entering the Kingdom of Heaven within us