On Consensus in Media

 

Russell Brand

Here is a recent wise quote from Russell Brand, paraphrased for brevity: “A consensus in mainstream media is not a verification. It is the opposite. The more you see the mainstream media making a point of claiming something is true, the more likely it is false.”

For “mainstream media,” I would substitute the term “broadcast platforms”: any information channel that is directed at a broad general audience. A more obvious example of a broadcast medium in this sense than even the traditional television networks is the education system. But it will also include newspapers at the local level, and large-circulation magazines: a National Geographic, a Scientific American, a Rolling Stone, a Time Magazine.

These are likely to be spreading false information, because these are the platforms on which it is most profitable and effective to spread false information. So if any powerful interested party can exert control of one, they are likely to do so for their purposes. Most probably, the government; but also business interests, professional groups, and other special interests with a lot of money to advertise.

If there really is a consensus on something, it should go without saying. Nobody needs to belabor the fact that the earth is round. So if a broadcast medium is repeatedly pointing out that something is true, this is almost in itself proof that it is not. You are looking at a propaganda campaign.

What about a “consensus of experts”? Good question. I would add that group who claims a consensus, or any organization that claims to govern by consensus, is really a dictatorship. Consider those elections in Eastern Europe in which the leader used to reliably poll over 90% of the votes. That’s consensus. It is not a good sign. It really means a situation in which nobody dares object to whoever has the strongest arm or the loudest voice. So beware any consensus of experts too.

We are all fortunate that the broadcast media are dying. It is a brave new world, in which what was long hidden should begin to appear in the light.

The Madness of Crowds

Isaiah

Given that people in groups are prone to madness, how can we prevent this and stay sane? It becomes an urgent issue. Perhaps the most important issue for any culture or civilization.

Freedom of speech. If someone sees the delusion, he or she must be free to announce it to others.

Ancient Israel had the tradition of prophecy. The system was not perfect, but the office of prophet was recognized: the individual could speak truth in against the social authority. And a Hebrew prophet was not without honour.

It is troubling therefore that we no longer recognize prophets.

Ancient Greece had a more accidental system. It had professional philosophers. Broken into city states, it was easy for a thoughtful individual who alienated the consensus in one city to escape to the next for asylum. Socrates was famously put to death for dissent—but in Plato’s account, he did have the option of instead slipping off to Thebes.

I suspect it was these two systems allowing perceptive and sane individuals to openly call out the mass delusions and popular sins that gave Judea and Greece, tiny nations, their overwhelming cultural and intellectual dominance over the ancient world; a dominance that persists into the present.

More recently, the British and American legal traditions of freedom of speech, imperfect as they are, are surely what has led to the modern global cultural and intellectual dominance of the Anglosphere.

Perhaps, it is true, a chicken is here in hot pursuit of a hypothetical egg. An honest group will naturally be more open to freedom of speech. A polity that is aware it has something to hide will naturally suppress it.

Either way, it is obviously ominous that free speech is now under attack. To believe in free speech is now automatically “racist.” It is not just the formal legal assault of “hate laws,” but “political correctness” and the social shunning of those whose opinions differ. Amplified and abetted by the cult of psychiatry, which essentially holds, in Orwell’s words, that “lunacy is a minority of one”—whatever the majority believes is necessarily true, and anyone who thinks otherwise necessarily mad. If some bearded, hair-shirted senior declares today in the street that we all risk divine retribution for our wrongs and errors, we do not respect him as prophet. We silence him as insane. Psychiatry is a tremendously effective tool for the matrix.