The Normalization of Evil: Media and State

If there is anything left over in the history of the human being it is like a collective adopting malicious and even in many cases Machiavellian thinking, ideas such as enslavement were a norm in the past, that women could not read was also a norm and that no one had education or access to knowledge was seen as normal in their particular times. And that is because events and examples of how our species has assumed any abuse or absurd dogma as normal and legitimate as long as societies have conformed to this type of dogmatic thinking due to the unwillingness to exercise critical thinking. It is amazing how scary the ability of human beings to adapt to new thoughts as time passes by is. Arranged marriage, any political or economic thought has been and is accepted for only one reason, which Goebbles demonstrated in Hitler's Germany, any form or almost any form of thought or action can be adopted by the masses if the relevant indoctrination propaganda strategies are used.

While the ways in which collective indoctrination has been carried out have changed over the years, it is now much easier to influence people. In the past, this was mostly and to a large extent a matter of tradition: customs or ideas were accepted for their own secular validity, but today, thanks to the media and social networks, they are tools that greatly influence public and collective opinion about what people may think.

The fundamental tool and the one that mass media do not need most to direct, indoctrinate and create a pattern of thought is the very concept of what you call "news". At present, most of the information consumed by the mass media is made up of a great plurality of news items that, apparently, lack any connection between them or of previous causes that might motivate them, instead of reporting facts, judgments and opinions that favor the interests and ideology of whatever the medium of the news are reported.

The media impose a quantitative paradigm of information: we believe we know many things but not why they happen, much less how they affect what happens to us. We may feel overwhelmed by the dismissal of 10,000 factory workers, by some traffic accident, by some war going on that has caused the loss of many lives in a distant country but how these events are motivated by our overabundant way of life or by the support corrupt rulers receive from our own states is a knowledge that is stolen from us and only rarely raised, in a marginal way. There is a saying that says "Not all the books in the world make you wise if you do not question what is being said in it" so we could apply the same logic and say that reading a great deal of news does not give us a better understanding of reality either.

The quantitative paradigm of information is accompanied by a peculiar informative dynamic. It is not the cause or the consequence of the facts that is news, but the fact itself; since what is important is not the meaning of the information but its quantity, those events that occur repeatedly or that are prolonged in time cease to be productive for the news because for the media and for the spectator, reader or follower indoctrinated, the information presented as a vague opinion of the same news is novelty.

It is ironic that the impact of some news is over in parts of the world than in others, the fact that a terrorist attack that kills 10 people in Paris has a far greater impact than when it happens in a country like Jordan or Afghanistan. Another example is when a natural phenomenon strikes a part of the planet, thousands of reporters, as journalists, come to the scene, but what happens when adversity ceases to be productive for the creation of a story? Even if the misfortune persists or intensifies, if it lasts longer it is no longer of interest, it has become "something normal, simple and banal" and is not news. To confuse information with novelty inevitably leads to the news becoming entertainment rather than information that could be used by any citizen to make analyses or understand what is really happening. We observe and understand, therefore, that on many occasions the only thing that the citizen of mass societies needs in order to accept any idea, information or dogma as normal is to see him or her again and again in the media as an attack on his or her rights or those of others.

Media like this have the capacity to legitimize what is normal and what is not, because what is more crowded then becomes what is normal for us what sets the standard for society. This is the cognitive bias of projection because if this new trend appears in the media then people who are not me have adopted this idea and therefore the mass media disseminate it, when in reality they are marking the beginning of collective thinking and indoctrination. This projection bias ends in the bias of false consensus that not only do we think other people think as we do but also agree with what we believe. If we see in the news that any fashion is normalizing we think that other people who also resort to that channel or medium should automatically think as I think, marking the beginning of the indoctrination of the masses and the end of individual critical thinking.

Normalization through reiteration has been a propaganda mechanism used with evident success in socialist systems for a long time. It is this same normalization that allowed the Venezuelan government to persecute, silence, expropriate and violate the human rights of all those who opposed it and called themselves "agents who preserve peace and truth for the people", making this society for a long time indifferent to the abuse of power, corruption and the alienation of property.

But this citizen indifference and ignorance ended up being detrimental to themselves, and in the past we have witnessed how police forces in countries like Honduras have lashed out at their citizens, causing even a much greater crisis than that experienced in Venezuela in 2017. This type of information has become so standardized that people are no longer shocked when violations of this magnitude occur. The same has happened with taxes and the tax collectors who demand payment of taxes, no matter how much they complain about the high costs of taxes or how much they protest about them because the media have normalized the fact that taxes are "part" of a democracy, that is, the alienation of capital produced by people can be stolen by a collective "good" that always ends up in the hands of corruption and in the pockets of politicians.

What can we say about how normal it has become to watch television or read on the web that the most powerful people like politicians and bankers are pardoned for their crimes? We certainly have no reason to be surprised by these situations, when we have standardised the term "appraisal" to refer to impunity before the law. If someone were to go to a restaurant where the chef had demanded to be "gauged" in front of the health inspections of his premises, what confidence could that person give? The obsession of the powerful to continue defending inimputabilities, aphorisms or discretionary graces like the pardon, should raise some suspicions about the tasting of these guys; but if the news lady gives this news and without a solution of continuity she talks about how well "our boys" have done in a certain sports competition, the matter should not be so serious. I am sure that in the other'democracies' things will work the same way.

Normally we see how the model or the leadership of the state are issues beyond what can be decided. One would have thought that voting and deliberation were fundamental parts of democracy, but it seems that we were wrong and those who call for a referendum on this and other issues are irrational and crazy conspirators. We have not exercised sovereignty for so long that it is a completely subversive and destabilizing idea to propose electing the head of state or voting on our rights. In any case, who cares? The propaganda media normalizes these continuous violations of our political freedom because of the debates on the reform of the constitution, education, taxes, the bailout of the banks, etc. "They're over." And it is true that such debates were represented in the media and that today they are no longer news; the decisions were taken but it should not be forgotten that the decisions taken can be revoked by the power of the sovereigns and that the accumulation of abuses does not create rights or imply their legitimation.

The media reiteration of the abuse eventually normalizes it because what some call "recovery" is nothing more than an acceptance of the violence of the state and the degradation of our lives. The scourges that have created so much damage in the world, that have created wars, that have promoted human rights violations, among others, continue to exist and have even been strengthened by propaganda normalization.

The ministry of truth in orwell's 1984 novel transformed the present by distorting the past, and now it turns out that the present government is the one that guarantees the welfare state when it was the same one that created the present conditions of poverty by violating people's freedom. There is no doubt that it is useful to reiterate a lie, but not to transform it into truth; to know is not, as a priority, to be informed, but rather to remember.

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_{Posted from my blog with SteemPress : Here}

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