Predators

DeDude Says:

I wonder if fact-based decision-making will ever have a comeback.

After WWII science and engineering delivered huge progress and their methods gained great respect. At the same time corporate media were for the most part clearly devoted to similar approaches of finding truth/facts and delivering them in an understandable way to the public. In the political system the manipulation did not occur that much at the level of facts but rather at the level of interpretation; because they knew that any attempt at faking facts would uniformly be revealed/condemned by media and get a very negative response from the public. Experts were generally trusted and importantly also generally trustworthy – when they were wrong it was usually the result of honest errors.

This did not work so well for the predators, those who collect more for themselves with little or no ethic/moral constraint on how they get it (or what they do to other people in the process of getting it). Predators start up with the conclusion (whatever gives me a better chance to get more) and work back to arguments that will support that conclusion, and then cherry-pick, manipulate or invent “facts” that support their arguments. This last step really gets in trouble in a society where truth and facts are being collected and respected.

Therefore, predators initiated an attack on experts and expertise to soften peoples trust in sources of complicated facts. Mistakes and misconduct from individual experts were blown up to “prove” that you cannot trust ANY expert. They build their own think tanks where “experts” used perverted semi-scientific approaches to produce “facts” that could support the predators forgone conclusions. Similarly, they build their own media networks and invaded existing networks, replacing real truth seeking journalism with a perverted propaganda format that would have made a 1930’ies dictator proud. Finally they found ways to drive out politicians with integrity and replace them with some that would serve their money masters before they serve their constituents.