A Nation of Easily Manipulated Dimwits? — Independence Day Passed with its Customary Superficiality — Even though George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Is Pretty Much Here

09 July 2013

National psychopathy interests me because it refutes the idea that human beings are even quasi-rational

Once we dump Rationality’s criterion for the objective consideration of facts and plans, we are free to ramble off in any self-destructive direction, without providing even a casually reasoned explanation.

This seems to be what is happening to the American Republic today, as the Fourth Amendment evaporates under repeated onslaughts from Big Government, aided by secret decisions from a completely unsupervised FISA court.

Public and media attention are in the wrong places — without the slightest (potentially remediating) sense of irony or upset. The Fourth of July this year was remarkable only in its rapt demonstration of prevailing American stupor.

Al Jazeera White House correspondent, Patty Culhane, made a list of things that should have tweaked American consciousness on Independence Day — but didn’t

She wrote, regarding Edward Snowden’s revelation about American government’s massively pervasive spying:

[L]et's detail what we now know the US government does because of [Edward] Snowden and others:

Keeps a record of every cell phone call made.

Keeps a record of all emails sent.

Takes pictures of all the letters mailed in the US.

Uses drones for domestic surveillance.

Reserves the right to detain people (including Americans) indefinitely without trial.

Can search homes without telling people they were there.

Can still carry out renditions.

Can get copies of all of your records (from the library, bank or credit card company) without a warrant.

So to sum things up, if you become a person of interest, the government can quickly find out everyone you have ever talked to and written to; everything you have ever read and bought; and everywhere you have ever been.

If you are overseas, they reserve the right to bring you back against your will and possibly hold you forever without trial.

© 2013 Patty Culhane, Is Snowden more distraction than traitor? — NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is being used to distract Americans from the truth behind spying allegations, Al Jazeera (05 July 2013)

I would add that this same Government also frequently acts on its self-granted right to blow “you” up with drone strikes, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.

Perspective

If Ms. Culhane’s list does not strike you as summing an odd evolutionary permutation of what America’s 1776 stood for, you are (frankly) either an ignoramus or an idiot.

So, where is America’s attention — to the degree that there actually is any?

Courtesy of the American media (both print and television) — our attention is apparently on Edward Snowden’s allegedly unworthy character, his Where’s Waldo whereabouts, or on the Egyptian military coup against democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi.

Each of these foci miss the point about urinated-away American principles of privacy and freedom — that one would have hoped would have especially been the focus of attention on Independence Day, 2013.

The moral? — Big Daddy Government has an easy job, when the public constitutes the equivalent of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s “electric sheep”

Dick’s title remains evocative, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In a poetic sense, Government’s convenient access to technology, combined with the idea that power corrupts, loosely makes it equivalent of Dick’s androids. And we, the public, are its dreamed sheep — two steps removed from Reality.

Wikipedia’s synopsis of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is directly pertinent:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian^[1] novel by George Orwell published in 1949.

The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of [:]

perpetual war,

omnipresent government surveillance,

and public mind control,

dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism . . . under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.^[2]

Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality

, but who may not even exist.

Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good.^[1]

The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party who works for theMinistry of Truth . . . which is responsible for propaganda and historical revisionism

His job is to re-write past newspaper articles so that the historical record always supports the current party line.^[3]

Sound familiar?

PeteFree.com

A Nation of Easily Manipulated Dimwits? — Independence Day Passed with its Customary Superficiality — Even though George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Is Pretty Much Here