Simple Ideas, Robust Evidence, Part 15: How the Ideologies and Rackets Prevail

The sociology is similar for all of them.

Noam Chomsky remarked on how independent thinkers are weeded out of the system, beginning in kindergarten and maybe earlier. By the time that Tom Wicker, a New York Times journalist, got his job, he was a perfect cog in the machine, believing everything that he wrote, even when he licked the boots of the powerful. Wicker angrily responded to people who called him an apologist to power with “Nobody tells me what the write!” Noam agreed, but noted that if Wicker did anything other than regularly lick the boots of the powerful, he would have never been a New York Times journalist. The system works more subtly than that.

Ed Herman’s Propaganda Model showed how “structural” factors, which were basically elite interests, determined what news was fit to print and what wasn’t. The Propaganda Model is a conflict-of-interest model in which the purported purpose of the American media, to hold the powerful to account and provide unbiased information so that the electorate could make informed decisions, was undermined by the powerful themselves. Ed said that the Propaganda Model did not preclude elite intervention in the media’s process, but that it was not needed to explain how the media performed. Noam generalized it further and said that the Propaganda Model was a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies are subjected to. Noam took it even further and said that the “prophets” of the Old Testament were the dissident intellectuals of their day, calling out the crimes of the powerful, and they were generally punished for it, which in those days could mean a violent death.

I began learning this long before I ever heard of Noam and Ed, when I asked what contribution our profession provided to society and everybody laughed at the question. As I discovered several years later, my question was the most important one and my profession was worthless because of a fatal conflict of interest at the profession’s core: we could not render independent opinions on the financial statements of the companies that we audited, not when they hired us to provide those opinions. That fatal conflict of interest lasts to this day.

This series of posts was intended to show how my work is built on simple ideas with robust evidence in their support, usually evidence that has never been refuted, or even attempted to be refuted. It is all very conservative. I began this series with Ed’s media analysis, and his very simple test of media impartiality. Nobody has ever credibly tried to refute Ed’s analyses. They couldn’t, and they instead responded with lies and personal attacks.

I wrote a post on how Dennis Lee put the world’s best heating system for free on people’s homes. I presented the physics, the scientific data, his ingenious marketing plan, and there is nothing to refute. It is very simple stuff, but I have yet to see even one of Dennis’s innumerable assailants over the past 40 years provide any discussion of those simple facts, as they instead lie about Dennis, usually by parroting the lies of others, lies that it takes little effort to see were lies.

This was all of part of my journey’s primary lesson: personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity. Everybody sees themselves as good guys, even Hitler, no matter how much blood gets on their hands. Ed called it “internalized values,” to explain how journalists could write things that were so far from any kind of balanced perspective, but without consciously lying.

In the medical racket, MDs-in-training are brainwashed into drugs and surgical procedures as the only legitimate tools of medicine. Any MD-in-training that thought differently had a big problem. They often went in somewhat idealistic, thought that nutrition and prevention would be key aspects of their practice (80% of them), but by the end, only 15% of them thought that way. It is not easy to swim upstream against one’s indoctrination.

When I heard from Brian O’Leary (in our epic note-trading session) that seven cartels controlled the world economy, it made instance sense to me. I was familiar with all of them, and from what I could see, the sociology of the media, or my erstwhile profession of auditing, applied to one degree or another to all of those cartels (AKA rackets). Nearly all of the rank-and-file believed in their mission, at least to start. Some asked naïve questions like I did, which everybody laughed at, and we were all honestly questioning the reality of the emperor’s robes that everybody else said were dazzling, and they could really seem to see those robes.

All of the rackets have naïve idealists like I was, asking their simple questions that are laughed off before they learned better than to ask them. When CIA case officers returned from the field to headquarters at Langley, the bloom was long gone from the rose of their conditioning, but by that time they were trapped in their careers and became zombies, shuffling through the halls, counting their days to early retirement, and pouring themselves into a bottle each night. The system was designed so that somebody like a Ralph McGehee would never figure it out and go public with his understanding. And over 99.9% of the time, it worked. As Noam said, if it didn’t work, then the organization was in trouble. Ralph was only one of a handful of CIA employees to figure it out and go public, and they all had hell to pay. The Ralph McGehees are voices in the wilderness, pushed to the margins, and such squeaky wheels could come to untimely ends. My pantheon is not a large one.

I lived through it in the energy racket, it has happened countless times in the medical racket and all the others. I have called these situations 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity, as everybody involved is trying to butter their bread. Those at the very top generally know full well what they are doing, while the rank-and-file jump through endless hoops for their masters and actually believe in their mission (and in those scarcity-based ideologies). They are the foot soldiers of the epic crimes that all of the rackets commit, and they do it with a clean conscience, at least at first. There are psychopaths in their ranks, but there are relatively few of them. The “best” of them sit near the top.

End scarcity and fear as humanity’s operating principles, and those dynamics should end. Only one thing can do that, which is what my work is all about.