Ending the Propagandocracy by Returning to Reason, Ethics and Truth

What we in the western world have for a long time believed to be our democracy has somewhere along the way mutated into something wholly different, because we have turned away from reason, ethics and truth.
Rather than being called a democracy, the system we in the western world live in today might far more accurately be called a “propagandocracy”.

It is by the power of deceptive manipulation that we are ruled by an arrogant elitist plutocracy.
These plutocratic “elites” have lost all understanding for basic ethics, as well as all respect for honesty and truth and all sense of compassion. And although this plutocratic ruling class sees itself as the world´s intellectual elite, in reality this “elite” has also lost most of its reasoning capacity .

But loss of reason doesn´t only inflict western society´s economic, intellectual and political elites. Stupidity has trickled down through all levels of society.

Reason, true reason in our relationship with the people around us, means that we consider the other person (or the other group of people, the other nation, the other religion) we encounter in life as an equal partner in these encounters. Reason also means that we consider the other one´s interests as valid as our own.
For in the long run this is the only way to live in peace with others. And if we constantly live in a state of conflict with those around us, we waste a lot of life and energy for no reason at all.
Democracy can´t live without the kind of reason, which seeks a livable compromise with others, a balance of interests, strives for peace.

In our time, however, we all are conditioned to rather seek short-time advantages for ourselves than reasonable long-time solutions for a peaceful and reasonable society.

We seek out the cheapest deals when we shop, even if this means that those people in the developing world, who by their labor have produced the things we are buying, are practically working under slave-labor conditions. In the long run this situation will lead to an unstable world. It will lead to a constant downward pressure for domestic wages, loss of domestic jobs and manufacturing capacity in the developed countries, a flow of illegal immigration into these countrie and increasing poverty for most everybody all over the world.

And we are just as unreasonable when we tend to prefer imported food or food made by agribusiness corporations for its cheap prizes. By doing so we bankrupt our country´s own family farmers. And while we risk our health in that dumb deal, we ultimately also destroy our society´s food security.

In some way we all are accomplices in this state of affairs. More often than not we all seem to have lost our sense for ethics, which ultimately is also a sense of reason.
If we want to stop the deterioration of our society, including our economy, we need to bring back ethical principles.

But even more than ordinary citizens so have most politicians lost their sense of ethics, when it comes to policy making. The same is true for economists, sociologist and scientists of many stripes.

In our society human life is counted in monetary value. When environmental hazards cause health damage to people living in neighborhood of corporate production facility, government employed economists calculate how much this increases health costs or the costs of workers being away from their job. And the media tells us the numbers. The suffering this needless destruction of their health causes to the afflicted people has become next to irrelevant in the discussion.
The corporation then calculates if it is more costly to pay legal fees or preventing the hazards by cleaner production methods. In developing countries, it´s always cheaper to just bribe some government officials than cleaning up the environmental mess.
The same calculations are done in connection to health or accident hazards for the workers.

Sociologist teach politicians and media elites how public opinion on certain issues can be formed or public criticism can be contained.

Psychologists search for ever more efficient ways of manipulating the individual via advertisement or via mind-control techniques or even via psychological and physical forms of torture.

Instead of talking about cooperative means to solve problems to the mutual benefit of everyone concerned, politicians talk about the one-sided interests of powerful groups or nations which can be pursued by any -including violent- means.

Just recently German President Köhler said in regard to Germany´s involvement in the Afghanistan war, that Germany as a country depending on free trade for protecting it´s industrial production and jobs must also be ready to defend it´s trade-lines by military means.

In other words: Germans are helping the Americans to kill Afghani people, so Germany will keep it´s positive trade balance?

But while President Köhler only expressed the ideas of large parts of the German political and economic elite, his ethical blindness so publicly shown was then after all a bit too much for ordinary Germans and so a storm of outrage about the issue caused Köhler finally to resign.

But we have to realize that life without ethics is basically self-defeating. Ethical principles create solidarity between all members of society, the weaker and the stronger among them. Those principles have been at the foundation of laws which were made to further peaceful dealings between individuals and nations.
Those principles also protect the weak from arbitrary violence and oppression by the stronger. But not only the weak are protect by those principles.
In a society without ethics even the strong will eventually loose. They will loose the protection those ethics would give them from those who challenge their leadership.

If society lives by what some call “the law of the jungle”, nobody will eventually feel safe enough to ever relax his guard. This in turn will result in suspicion and fear of everyone against everyone else to the point of a full-blown mass-paranoia.
In the long run without ethics we all would go crazy. Society could no longer function.

How can we define ethics in political terms?

We might start with the first article of the German constitution:

“The dignity of man must never be violated, respecting and protecting this human dignity must be the highest task of all government authority.”

This article actually precedes all others of the German constitution, including the second article which confirms the respect for all human life.

This first passage was written as the direct consequence of the lesson learned from the national disaster of the Nazi era.
The Nazis had shown no respect for human life and even less for human dignity.
In Nazi ideology human beings were categorized in leaders who rule and control and masses who are ruled and controlled to serve the purposes of the rulers.
Then there were “Untermenschen” ( subhumans), people of different ethnic groups.
During the war those people were then used like machine parts without regard to their humanity to further the “war-effort” or they were experimented upon in lethal “medical research”.
And finally there were “unworthy lives” (handicapped people who were considered as being of no use at all and could therefor be “put to death”).
And everyone who protested or resisted the inhumane policies could be incarcerated, tortured and executed.

The writers of the post-war German constitution realized that when respect for human dignity is lost, than respect for human life is lost shortly thereafter.

Respect for human dignity today, according to the international human rights declaration, means an absolute ban on any form of torture, including non-touch torture-methods via water-boarding, stress positions, noise-torture for sleep-deprivation, the use of heat, cold, hunger and the use of sexual abuse and enforced nudity as psychological torture-methods.

After respect for human dignity the most important ethical principle we have to bring back into politics is honesty.

The truth isn´t always easy to find, since it is most often a very complicated set of facts and nobody is capable of knowing and evaluating all the known scientific facts.
Untruth, however, lies and deceptions, can be detected far easier and they must be uncovered. To do so is essential for humanity´s future.

There cannot be any democratic society without respect for truth.
Honesty is a foundation for trust and trust a foundation for a peaceful living together.
If we want peace in our own society or among nations, we need to counter lies and deliberate untruths, so we can built up trust.

But since most people have been deceived by politicians and the media, political lies are often believed without scrutiny.

Falsehoods have become part of the mainline consensus. People have built their worldview and sometimes even their personal identity on false premises.

Even when lies and deceptions are uncovered by clear physical and otherwise undeniable evidence it will not be easy for most people to change their minds on issues they have believed in for such a long time.

I am aware of the psychological difficulties many people have in accepting that the world is so very much different from what they thought it was.
In some cases challenging the mainline consensus, even with the best of evidence, might be considered a provocation, an act of radicalism.

However,while World War III is looming at this very moment like a dark shadow over our heads, backing down from truthful investigations for fear of treading on some people´s sensibilities is, in my opinion, no longer ethical; neither is it justifiable to keep quiet about a provocative truth for fear of becoming ostracized or an outcast.

Truth sometimes hurts, but upholding lies in accordance to a false and only media-created consensus as the unchallenged image of reality has become far more devastating and dangerous for all of us.

Truth is a powerful weapon, even if it is a non-violent one.
Why?
Because truth makes many other weapons less usable or even unusable.

For instance uncovering the truth about false-flag attacks and showing them as what they are as the 9/11 truth-movement is doing, make new false-flag attacks less likely. Because from now on large parts of the population will suspect in every further “terrorist” attack the hand of the government. And the people who have those suspicions will inform their neighbors and friends about them.

From now on the people who plan a false-flag attack on their own population or the population of their allies will have to take into account that those attacks might badly backfire on themselves, and they might themselves come under wide-scale public scrutiny.
The majority population of a nation might no longer be ready to be manipulated into another war against the enemy designated by their corrupt political or economic elites after such an attack. Instead the citizens might turn against their would-be manipulators.

Overcoming the propagandocracies of our times by a collective commitment towards reason, ethics, honesty and truth is vital.
Truth will empower the people, the ordinary citizens of all nations. Truth will help the people to keep their politicians and also the politicians´ rich paymasters or the string-pullers from otherwise powerful elites in check.

When lies and deceptions are uncovered, and the truth is being accepted by more and more people, society will change for the better. This change might take some time, possibly a long time, but it will be inevitable.