“Life
is real! Life is earnest” William Wadsworth Longfellow
Knowledge is an indispensable
asset of the free individual, and, as any self-respecting despot knows, free
individuals are a danger to government absolutism. Our governments expend
therefore a lot of effort in preventing the masses from learning the true facts of the
world they live in, while acquiring more and more information about what the rest
of us do and think.
The official narratives offered
to the public about the State’s aims and conduct, are ever more deceptive. Yet,
because so extensively promoted by the mainstream media, they gain credibility,
rendering all alternatives as serious errors, the result of some deviations
from the norms of morality, which deserve punishment by the law.
Creating an illusory world in
place of the real one is a patently devilish occupation. Devilish also are the
State’s grand-scale intrusions into our privacy, which conjure up the image of
those flying demons in The Master and Margarita, jetting over the city, lifting the roofs of all the houses below and exposing the lives of the people therein.
Once in a while, the official
narratives can contain actual truth, delivered, however, with considerable
delay and timed to suit political interests. Take for instance the phone
hacking scandal, the Bloody Sunday investigation, the Hillsborough inquiry, and
several other abominations perpetrated by ministers and officials under the
pretext of national security etc. etc., left to fester - wrapped up in layers
of secrecy - for years, then disinterred at a time when they could be used as
political paybacks or when some other benefit could be extracted and consensus
had been built across political factions for a controlled release of the facts. As they all live in glasshouses, the throwing of stones is not
something governments do without careful forethought.
There is also what often goes by
the name of ‘open secret’ – that is truth acknowledged by many but never
publicly confessed, never disseminated through the media, truth kept in a state
of limbo, either because the time is not right to disquiet the masses or
because public acknowledgement would entail some penal consequences that the
Establishment doesn’t like to incur.
Official infamies are never
spilled out in their crude, unadulterated format, but are filtered and with
their asperities blunted by the press. There is no truth outside the mainstream
channels - only the mainstream media, the umpire of our perceptions, is capable
of giving events the stamp of authenticity.
The official narratives,
nowadays, can also be the expression of non-reality, of theatrically staged
events or things that never happened – a
far more dangerous phenomenon than the traditional conspiracies, as it involves
not only serious, state-sanctioned villainy, but also an elevated degree of
madness.
Like
the veil of maya that can only be pierced through transcendental
knowledge, the official narratives and deception will only be demystified by
individuals’ understanding of what is in their nature and what is cunningly intended to condition it.
