Comment by stetrain
5 months ago
I think treating the government as a singular entity pushing a narrative is missing a bit. There is no singular government moving in lock-step, I think we've seen a lot of those seams showing recently.
There are factions, supported by various wealthy powerful interests. Those factions include people in government but also people funding or controlling media.
The owner and CEO of a major social network was literally given a public-facing government position, and others in the administration were previously TV personalities.
Wealth, media, and government are an ouroboros, not a one-directional megaphone from The Government to The Citizens.
This is true in a _well functioning democratic government_ - by design: as long as there are differences, a single actor cannot take over.
Understanding that the media is owned by powerful people, and people have agendas, is a key point to media literacy that should be taught at schools. It doesn't mean media should be ignored, nor that they always aim to manipulate (with some exceptions). It's, again, healthy if you understand it as it is (a viewpoint, espoused by people with a specific worldview). Interpreting the news require critical thinking. Most people never develop critical thinking.
>a single actor cannot take over.
This is a distinction without a difference. People can screech about "we're a democracy, we don't have a king" all they want but if the overwhelming amount of discretionary authority in the system is held by a fairly small group of people cut from approximately the same cloth it doesn't really matter, they're all gonna decide things the same ways and the results are gonna be just as divorced from what people want.
It doesn't matter if you have a thousand people working to appease the ideological whims of one absolute ruler or a thousand people with the same set of ideological whims, it's still one set of ideological whims being worked towards.
it's a distinction with A TON of difference. Well-functioning democracies have a push-and-pull that tends to slow things down BUT also prevents massive outreaches. Systems with tons of "sides" are stabler than dual systems because of this.
> It doesn't matter if you have a thousand people working to appease the ideological whims of one absolute ruler or a thousand people with the same set of ideological whims, it's still one set of ideological whims being worked towards.
that's exactly the point - there's a third option.
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You're contrasting dictatorship vs oligarchy. The key differentiator for democracies is leaders who are subject to re-election incentives.
Populist parties are surging all over the world. Perhaps there are a few modern democracies where all the political elites are "cut from approximately the same cloth", but if so, they aren't countries I am very familiar with.
Lack of critical thinking is a bit of a worldwide schooling system failure. Underfunding on one hand and not having an education plan for people to develop those skills leads to what we have. Some are lucky to get those skills from home or from top tier schools.
I imagine that this state of things was somewhat beneficial for the ruling elites but Russia is now showing the whole western world, that dumb population is a huge liability.
Indeed it is - and likely by design anyway (critical thinking is bad for political control, after all). You generally want the ones in power (preferably the ones aligned to you) to be better educated than the masses.
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Sure, it's a bunch of silos made up of sub-silos with people with their own goals.
But, I have far too often seen this "the government isn't a monolith" assertion used in the most deceitful, dishonest irredeemably bad faith arguments here on HN (and other parts of the internet as well) to shut down discussion of cases where some subset of the government is doing things that are bad for it's own selfish reasons.
Ditto for the "they're not literally conspiring" assertion used to shut down discussion of cases of where interests align and no conspiring or active coordinate is needed to achieve the results.