I have come to see that people who rely on legacy media for their news and information – CNN, Fox, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, and on and on – have been and are being indoctrinated. I can tell where people get their news by listening to them. Legacy media, mainstream media, has become an arm of industry. It probably always was. Media bias is not always overt; it can be in what they choose to cover, or not cover, as one example. (Like my autism prevalence story from yesterday.) People who believe the media, who are indoctrinated, myself included, are another form of advertising for industry. A pretty good one!

I think people know, at a deep level, that humans are harming themselves and the planet via chemicals. But they also – viciously even – defend their “right” to access those chemicals, to manufacture and sell those chemicals, wellbutso, to hold those chemicals in esteem. How do we exist while holding these opposing ideologies?

I should read George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is how he describes “doublethink“:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

Wikipedia: “Doublethink is a process of indoctrination in which subjects are expected to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth.”

I’m using chemicals as an example but this holds for politics as well. I mean, how else do you get people to vote against their own self-interests?