https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57792.htm
Only Idiots Believe The US Is Protecting Australia From China
The Economist has taken a keen interest in Australia lately, which if you know anything about The Economist is something you never want to see happen to your country. Two articles published in the last few days by the notorious propaganda outlet have celebrated the fact that Australia appears to be the most likely nation to follow the United States into a hot war with China as it enmeshes itself further and further with the US war machine.
In “How Joe Biden is transforming America’s Asian alliances,” The Economist writes the following:
“Meanwhile, the ‘unbreakable’ defence relationship with Australia is deepening, following the AUKUS agreement struck in March, amid a flurry of equipment deals and military exercises. Should war break out with China, the Aussies seem the most willing to fight at America’s side. Australian land, sea and air bases are expanding to receive more American forces. Under the AUKUS deal, Australia is gaining its own long-range weapons, such as nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) submarines to be developed jointly with America and Britain. The three partners want to work on other military technologies, from hypersonic missiles to underwater drones.
“Taken together the ‘latticework’ of security agreements, shows how America’s long-heralded pivot to Asia is accelerating.”
In “Australia is becoming America’s military launch-pad into Asia,” The Economist elaborates upon this war partnership with tumescent enthusiasm, calling it a “mateship” and likening it to a “marriage”, and calling for a rollback of US restrictions on sharing military technology with Australia.
“If America ever goes to war with China, American officials say the Aussies would be the likeliest allies to be fighting with them,” The Economist gushes, adding, “Australia’s geographical advantage is that it lies in what strategists call a Goldilocks zone: well-placed to help America to project power into Asia, but beyond the range of most of China’s weapons. It is also large, which helps America scatter its forces to avoid giving China easy targets.”
The Economist cites White House “Asia Tsar” Kurt Campbell reportedly saying of Australia, “We have them locked in now for the next 40 years.”
“Equally, though, Australia may have America locked in for the same duration,” The Economist hastens to add.
Well gosh, that’s a relief.
“How the world sees us,” tweeted former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr when sharing the Economist article.
“Historians will be absolutely baffled by what’s happening in Australia right now: normally countries never voluntarily relinquish their sovereignty and worsen their own security position out of their own accord. They normally have to lose a war and be forced to do so,” commentator Arnaud Bertrand added to Carr’s quip.
As much as it pains me to admit it, The Economist is absolutely correct. The Australian government has been showing every indication that it is fully willing to charge into a hot war with its top trading partner to please its masters in Washington, both before and after the US puppet regime in Canberra changed hands last year.
This sycophantic war-readiness was humorously mocked on Chinese state media back in 2021 by Impact Asia Capital co-founder Charles Liu, who said he didn’t think the US will actually fight a war with China over Taiwan, but the Australians might be stupid enough to fight it for them.
“US is not going to fight over Taiwan,” Liu said. “It’s not going to conduct a war over Taiwan. They may try to get Japanese to do it, but Japanese won’t be so stupid to do it. The only stupid ones who might get involved are the Australians, sorry.”
He had nothing to be sorry about; he was right. Australians are being very, very stupid, and not just our government. A recent Lowy Institute poll found that eight in ten Australians believe the nation’s alliance with the United States is important for Australia’s security, despite three-quarters also saying they believe the alliance makes Australia more likely to be drawn into a war in Asia.
That’s just plain stupid. A war with China is the absolute worst case security scenario for Australia; anything that makes war with China more likely is making us less secure. Making bad decisions which hurt your own interests is what stupid people do.
That’s not to say Australians are naturally dimwitted; we’re actually pretty clever as far as populations go. What’s making us stupid in this case is the fact that our nation has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, a massive chunk of which is owned by longtime US empire asset Rupert Murdoch. This propaganda-conducive information environment has been distorting Australia’s understanding of the world so pervasively in recent years that on more than one occasion I’ve had total strangers start babbling at me about the dangers of China completely out of nowhere within minutes of striking up conversation with them.
This artificially manipulated information ecosystem has made Australians so pants-on-head idiotic that they think the US empire is filling their country up with war machinery because it loves them and wants to protect them from the Chinese. That’s as stupid as it gets.
The single biggest lie being circulated in Australia right now is that our government is militarising against China as a defensive measure. China has literally zero history of invading and occupying countries on the other side of the planet. You know who does have a very extensive history of doing that? The United States. The military superpower that Australia’s military is becoming increasingly intertwined with. The belief that we’re intertwining ourselves with the world’s most aggressive, destructive and war-horny military force as a defensive measure to protect ourselves against that military force’s top rival (who hasn’t dropped a bomb in decades) is transparently false, and only a complete idiot would believe it.
We’re not militarising to defend ourselves against a future attack by China, we’re militarising in preparation for a future US-led attack on the Chinese military. We’re militarising in preparation to involve ourselves in an unresolved civil war between Chinese people that has nothing to do with us. China has been sorting out its own affairs for millennia and has managed to do so just fine without the help of white people running in firing military explosives at them, and Taiwan is no exception.
The imperial media talk nonstop about how the People’s Republic of China is preparing to seize control of Taiwan using military force, without ever mentioning the fact that that’s exactly what the US empire is doing. The US empire is preparing to wrest Taiwan away from China to facilitate its long-term agenda to balkanize, weaken and subjugate its top rival.
Only a complete blithering imbecile would believe any part of this is being done defensively. It’s being done to secure unipolar planetary domination for the world’s most powerful and destructive government, and only an absolute moron would agree to risk their own country’s security and economic interests to help facilitate it.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/wikipedia-information-warfare-tool/5831172?doing_wp_cron=1693800583.1913349628448486328125
Wikipedia Is an Information Warfare Tool. Hijacked by U.S. Intelligence
Wikipedia Used to Smear and Defame Truthtellers
Intelligence agencies have a long history of using propaganda as a tool of war, and the effectiveness of information warfare radically improved with the emergence of the internet, to say nothing of artificial intelligence and social media.
If you’re over 50, you can probably remember a time when your family had a row of encyclopedias on the bookshelf — usually obtained at considerable cost — which were perused whenever you needed to learn more about a particular topic.
Today, you can’t even give a complete set of encyclopedias away because, well, we have Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia has also become a favored propaganda tool, so to call it unreliable would be an understatement.
According to Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger — who left Wikipedia in 2002, the year after its inception — U.S. intelligence has been manipulating the online encyclopedia since at least 2008, if not longer. Sanger recently sat down to speak with independent journalist Glenn Greenwald (video above) about the subversion of the site he helped create.1
The Blatant Bias of Wikipedia
Sanger says he noticed a bias creeping in around 2006, particularly in areas of science and medicine. Around 2010, he started noticing that articles about Eastern Medicine were being changed to reflect blatantly biased positions, using “dismissive epithets” to paint this ancient tradition as quackery.
In 2012, evidence also emerged revealing a Wikipedia trustee and “Wikipedian in Residence” were being paid to edit pages on behalf of their clients and secure their placement on Wikipedia’s front page in the “Did You Know” section,2 which publicizes new or expanded articles3 — a clear violation of Wikipedia rules.
“It really got over the top … between 2013 and 2018,” Sanger says, “and by by at the time Trump became president, it was almost as bad as it is now. It’s amazing, you know, no encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has ever been as biased as Wikipedia has been …
I remember being mad about Encyclopedia Britannica and The World Book not mentioning my favorite topics, [and] presenting only certain points of view in a way that establishment sources generally do. But this is something else. This is entirely different. It’s over the top.”
Greenwald agrees, highlighting some recent examples of the “over the top” kind of establishment bias, such as Wikipedia simply declaring that the Ukraine-Biden scandal is a conspiracy theory designed to undermine Biden:
“The very first sentence reads: ‘The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was Vice President of the United States, engaged in corrupt activities relating to his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.’
‘As part of efforts by Donald Trump and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump’s first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden’s reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign,’ the Wikipedia entry still reads.
So, notice: The Biden-Ukraine scandal is — according to Wikipedia — the ‘Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory’ but the Trump controversy involving Ukraine is ‘the Trump–Ukraine scandal’. Everything is written to comport with the liberal world view and the Democratic Party talking points.”
Wikipedia’s treatment of all things COVID-related is equally skewed. It presents only the establishment’s “truth” across the board, no matter how much evidence there is to refute it.
‘Truth’ Has Been Married to Ideology
“Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia devoted to truth,” Greenwald says. The problem is that “The premise seems to be that you don’t have truth anymore independent of ideological outlook.”
Indeed, Sanger points out that Wikipedia’s official policy even declares that 80% of Right-wing media is unreliable, and “that really, really colors the articles and what the editors allow the articles to say,” he says. Just how did we get to a point where “truth” is tied to a particular ideology? Common sense tells you it simply cannot be so.
Intel Agencies Control Wikipedia
One explanation for why this ideological bias has taken over Wikipedia is that it’s intentionally being used as a propaganda tool by intelligence agencies and the globalist establishment that is seeking to implement a new global governance, a New World Order/One World Government.
To succeed in that Herculean effort, they can’t allow a multitude of dissenting viewpoints to proliferate, and intelligence agencies are working together to disseminate and uphold the Deep State’s narratives worldwide. Sanger puts it this way:
“I think that the Left … very, very deliberately seeks out to take control. Except it isn’t just the Left. We’re learning that now, aren’t we? No, it’s the establishment, and they have their own agenda.
I’m not going to try to offer any opinions — because it’s not something that I study — as to how they bring that about. But it’s clear that between 2005 and 2015 … Wikipedia moved onto the establishment’s radar, and we … have evidence that … even as early as … 2008 … CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia. Think they stopped doing that? No.
And not just them. We know that a great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online, and where, if not on websites like Wikipedia?
They pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the [intelligence] community. [They] learn the Wikipedia game and then push what they want to say with their own people. So, that’s my take on that.”
Google and Social Media Are Controlled Too
As noted by Greenwald, Google has played a significant role in Wikipedia’s growth and success by algorithmically placing Wikipedia answers at the top of most searches, and, of course — while they don’t discuss this in the interview — Google also has deep and longstanding ties to the military-intelligence-industrial complex and the globalist Deep State.
The same can be said for social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. As reported by Jimmy Dore in the video above, in early 2023, Elon Musk released documents showing Twitter’s former executives censored content at the request of the FBI and assisted the U.S. military’s online propaganda campaigns.
Twitter also censored anti-Ukraine narratives on behalf of several U.S. intelligence agencies. Similarly, Facebook censored accurate information that was damaging to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign at the direct request of the FBI. There’s simply no doubt that intelligence agencies are directly involved in controlling and directing public information flow, and Wikipedia is invaluable in that respect.
Anonymous Writers Have No Credibility
Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t stress a key feature of Wikipedia that makes it unreliable, no matter what, and that is the fact that contributing authors and editors are all anonymous.
Clearly, the credibility of an author, regardless of the media format, is of importance when trying to determine the veracity of a given topic, keeping in mind that even experts in the same field will often reach different (and perhaps opposing) conclusions.
Not every expert will have read and evaluated the exact same evidence, for example, leading to differences in interpretation of data. This is normal and unlikely to change, as it is human nature to draw conclusions based on our own breadth of experience and knowledge.
It’s then up to the reader to make up their mind about which of the two or more experts they believe is most correct — a choice that in turn is dependent on the reader’s own prejudices and knowledge base. That said, it should be obvious that no one individual, or even group of individuals, can be the final arbiter of which expert opinion is “the truth.”
However, that’s exactly the position that Wikipedia has inserted itself into. They now decide who they think is right and which position is the correct one, and they simply censor opposing views.
Google Must Have Known They Were Promoting Unreliable Info
Considering that one of the primary factors that come into play when determining the credibility of an author is his or her credentials, affiliations and previous writings,4 how is it that Google promotes Wikipedia as an authority for every possible type of information by listing them at the top of its search results?
And how can Google use Wikipedia as a primary tool for its quality raters to establish credibility of other online material?5,6 It doesn’t make sense, unless you realize that neither Google nor Wikipedia are about giving people accurate and unbiased information. Their function is to facilitate the programming of people with a certain set of narratives and viewpoints.
As early as 2011, the fact that Wikipedia editors were being paid by corporations to remove and suppress unwanted information was well known and had been declared scandalous.7 Yet nothing changed. At least not for the better.
A 2014 paper8 titled, “Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia” by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, compared 4,000 articles that appear in both encyclopedias and found 73% of Wikipedia’s articles contained political buzz words, compared to 34% in Britannica, and in nearly all cases, Wikipedia was more left-leaning than the Britannica.
Wikipedia Used to Smear and Defame Truthtellers
A key take-home from all this is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. It’s a propaganda tool, and relying on it will frequently leave you wearing the dunce hat. Articles on science and medicine are definitely corrupted and biased in favor of establishment views and should never be used to make medical decisions.
According to a 2014 study,9,10 which assessed the veracity of medical claims made on Wikipedia by cross-checking them with the latest peer-reviewed research, reported finding “many errors” in articles concerning the 10 costliest medical conditions. In fact, 9 out of 10 entries — 90%! — contained assertions that were contradicted by published research.
“Health care professionals, trainees, and patients should use caution when using Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care,” the authors warned.
That said, articles about historical events, current geopolitical issues and the biographies of public figures are not much better. Greenwald himself has seen his personal page transform from a neutral listing of his work history and accomplishments to an “ideological war” description that paints him in a bad light.
Many excellent scientists and doctors who veered from the establishment narrative on COVID have also been shamefully smeared and defamed by Wikipedia, and anyone who tries to clarify or clear up inaccuracies on the site is simply blocked.
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, for example, has repeatedly tried to “correct provably false facts” about her background on Wikipedia, only to be told she’s “not a reliable source” and having her edits overridden by anonymous editors that guard her page, making sure her award-winning work is kept hushed and her character portrait tarnished.11 Other examples of “sanitizing” certain pages and tarnishing others can be found in a June 28, 2015, article12 in The Epoch Times.
Ditch Wikipedia and Use Other Online Encyclopedias
If you’re interested in learning more about Wikipedia, its history and inner workings, pick up a copy of Andrew Lih’s book, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”13 In it, Lih asks, “If Wikipedia is a minefield of inaccuracies, should one even be tiptoeing through this information garden?” It’s a fair question, for sure.
Similarly, in a 2005 blog post critiquing Wikipedia, Nicholas Carr, author of “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” noted:14
“[A]n encyclopedia can’t just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What’s the worth of an unreliable reference work?”
The good news is there are dozens of other online encyclopedias, many of which do not suffer from this entrenched ideological bias. Two great resources are encyclosearch.org and encycloreader.org, which allow you to search for answers across dozens of encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, at once. This way, you can compare a multitude of sources.
Examples of more specialized encyclopedias include Ballotpedia (an explicitly neutral encyclopedia of American politics), Scholarpedia, EduTechWiki, MedlinePlus (a medical encyclopedia), Encyclopedia Mythica (religion, folklore and mythology) and HandWiki (computing, science, technology and general).
Sanger is involved in the creation of encyclosearch.org, which he describes as an effort to “strike a blow against censorship and control of information by simply making it easier to find the all the other encyclopedias that are out there.”
Truth be told, Wikipedia is dependent on your lack of knowledge about how they really operate. Taking advantage of your desire for quick information, their goal is to shuttle your thoughts, opinions and knowledge into a silo that doesn’t allow anything in except what they put in there. And what they’re putting on their site is some of the most biased information you’ll find anywhere in media today.
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https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/03/chris-hedges-our-collective-trauma-is-the-road-to-tyranny/
Our Collective Trauma is the Road to Tyranny
American society spawns trauma and this trauma expresses itself in a variety of self-destructive pathologies, including the erosion of democracy and rise of neo-fascism.
Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society.
The core traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt — are celebrated. The virtues of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice, are belittled, neglected and crushed. The professions that sustain community, such as teaching, manual labor, the arts, journalism and nursing, are underpaid and overworked. The professions that exploit, such as those in high finance, Big Pharma, Big Oil and information technology, are lavished with prestige, money and power.
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in The Sane Society.
The classic works on trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Judith Herman state bluntly that what is accepted as normal behavior in a corporate society is at war with basic human needs and our psychological and physical health. Huge segments of the American public, especially the tens of millions of people who have been discarded and marginalized, endure chronic trauma. Barbara Ehrenreich in “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” describes the life of the working poor as one long “emergency.” This trauma is as destructive to us personally as it is socially and politically. It leaves us in a state of dysphoria where confusion, agitation, emptiness and loneliness define our lives. Whole segments of American society, especially the poor, have been rendered superfluous and invisible. As Dr. van der Kolk writes, “trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
“Our culture teaches us to focus on our personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms,” Dr. van der Kolk notes.
Trauma numbs our capacity to feel. It fractures our self. It disconnects us from our bodies. It keeps us in a state of hyperarousal. It makes us confuse our desires, often artificially implanted by the consumer society, with our needs. Traumatized people view the world around them as hostile and dangerous. They lack a positive image of themselves and lose the capacity to trust. Many replace intimacy and love with sexual sadism, which is how we became a pornified culture. Trauma creates what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls a “counterfeit” world defined by phantom enemies, lies and dark conspiracies. It negates a sense of purpose and a life of meaning.Trauma, Dr. Herman writes, “impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately.” It induces feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, she writes, “as well as the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that occurs in daily life. Trauma severely compromises the capacity for intimacy. Trauma can dramatically reduce focus to extremely limited goals, often a matter of hours or days.”
“If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma,” Dr. Maté writes. “Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources — these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
Trauma also drives many to flee into the arms of those who are orchestrating the abuse.
Systematic and repetitive trauma, whether by a single abuser or a political system, destroys personal autonomy. The perpetrator becomes omnipotent. Resistance is accepted as futile. “The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being allowed to live,” Dr. Herman writes. This trauma lays the foundation for the most insidious characteristic of all tyrannies, large and small. Total control. Prolonged trauma reduces its victims to a state of psychological infantilism. It conditions them to plead for their own enslavement.
“We are not content with negative obedience, not even with the most abject submission,” George Orwell wrote of the ruling “Inner Party” in his novel “1984.” “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.”
Christian fascism, the subject of my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” preys on this trauma. It replicates systems of control common to all tyrannies, including cults. Christian fascists skillfully break down adherents, severing them from their families and communities. They manipulate their shame, despair, feelings of worthlessness and guilt – the byproducts of their trauma – to demand total obedience to the church leadership, who are almost always white and male. These leaders, supposedly spokespeople for God, cannot be questioned or criticized. The connecting tissue among the disparate militia groups, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-abortion activists, right-wing patriot organizations, Second Amendment advocates, neo-Confederates and Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 is not only this Christian fascism but trauma.
“Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims,” Dr. Herman writes. “Slaveholders demand gratitude from their slaves. Religious cults demand ritualized sacrifices as a sign of submission to the divine will of the leader. Perpetrators of domestic battery demand that their victims prove complete obedience and loyalty by sacrificing all other relationships. Sex offenders demand that their victims find sexual fulfillment in submission. Total control over another person is the power dynamic at the heart of pornography. The erotic appeal of this fantasy to millions of terrifyingly normal men fosters an immense industry in which women and children are abused, not in fantasy but in reality.”
Donald Trump is a perpetrator and savior. He personifies the callous indifference of patriarchy, wealth, privilege and power towards the vulnerable, as well as the promise that once his cultish followers surrender to him they will be protected. He inspires in equal measure fear and solace.
“People who embrace the small tyrannies are much more susceptible to embracing the large ones,” Dr. Herman told me. “When you have a political party that embraces the subordination of women, the subordination of people of color, the subordination of gender non-conforming people, and the subordination of non-Christians, then it’s not a party that embraces democracy. It’s a party that is looking for a fascist leader and is going to find one.”
In Dr. van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” he opens with stark statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that “one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”
The endemic trauma in American society, which is getting worse under the onslaught of the gig economy, pronounced social inequality, indiscriminate police violence, the climate crisis and the seizure of the political process and most institutions by corporations and the ruling oligarchs, is our most serious public health crisis. It has grave individual, social and political consequences.
“If trauma is truly a social problem,” Dr. Herman in “Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice” writes, “then recovery cannot simply be a private individual matter. The wounds of trauma are not merely those caused by the perception of violence and exploitation. The actions or inactions of bystanders, all those who are complicit in or who prefer not to know about the abuse or who blame the victims, often cause deeper wounds.” “Full healing,” she adds, “because it originates in a fundamental injustice, requires a full hearing within the community to repair through some measure of justice the trauma survivors have endured.”
You can see my recent two-part interview with Dr. Herman here and here.You can see my interview with Dr. Maté here.
“Recovery has to take place in relationships,” Dr. Herman said in my interview. “When people feel reconnected to their communities and re-accepted in their communities, then the shame is relieved and the isolation is relieved, and that really creates the platform for healing.”
The key is community. Not virtual communities. But communities where we can reconnect and see in our wounds the wounds of others. It requires access, without onerous medical bills, to mental health professionals. It requires dismantling the corporate structures of oppression. It demands a new ethic, one that values empathy and self-sacrifice. We must reject the cynicism, indifference and cult of the self that all tyrannies inculcate in those they dominate to keep them passive. We must reach out to our neighbors, especially those in distress and those who are demonized. We must uncouple from consumer society and turn away from the allure of our cultural narcissism.
The moral philosopher Bernard Williams argues that resentment and indignation are as important as empathy and connection to solidify social bonds. It is not only our own dignity we must protect, but the dignity of others. These “shared sentiments” he writes “bind people together in a community of feeling.” Acts of resistance around these “shared sentiments,” this “community of feeling,” establish ourselves as distinct, autonomous beings. We may not defeat these tyrannies, but by battling against them we free ourselves from the grip of the small and large tyrannies that deform American society.
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