Whenever corporate magnates try to justify their destructive greed or conservative politicians whip up hateful and ignorant sentiments among their supporters, it is easy to appreciate that power elites and the political right are the natural home of intellectual dishonesty. We can see evidence of this all around us and examples abound.
As The Conversation has pointed out, the major oil and gas companies “have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science.”
Through the long months of the unfolding genocide in Gaza, the shocking lies of Israeli spokespersons have become routine. The Intercept points out that Israel’s representatives and enablers constantly advance accusations or justifications that “are either complete fabrications or have not been substantiated with a shred of evidence.”
I’m not suggesting here that the left has an entirely unblemished track record of truth-telling. Dogmatic approaches, wishful thinking and even outright falsehoods are not unknown on our side. Still, those who support and perpetuate systems of oppression and exploitation are unavoidably driven into a swamp of lies, while the struggle for a just and rational society lends itself to honest accounting.
Class lies
Any viewpoint that challenges capitalism as a system of production holds that system to be inherently exploitative and unjust, and aims to replace the existing system with a more egalitarian and sustainable social order. For capitalists and their ideological enablers, however, no such considerations can be entertained. They must deny or minimize the predatory nature of their system and, above all else, defend it against all challenges.
In his History and Class Consciousness, Hungarian socialist Georg Lukács grappled with these very questions. He argued that, for the capitalist class, “it is a matter of life and death to understand its own system of production in terms of eternally valid categories: it must think of capitalism as being predestined to eternal survival by the eternal laws of nature and reason. Conversely, contradictions that cannot be ignored must be shown to be purely surface phenomena, unrelated to this mode of production.” Those who insist that the profit system is the pinnacle of human achievement must part company with truth and reality “as soon (they are) called upon to face problems that… point beyond the limits of capitalism.”
The great problem for us is that the defenders of the present order and the deceptions they peddle enjoy undue power and influence, as we must reluctantly acknowledge. Indeed, their view of things is widely regarded as received wisdom and it forms part of the official discourse. As Marx and Engels famously noted in The German Ideology,
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.
These dominant ways of thinking may serve the purposes of people like Elon Musk or Galen Weston, who refuse to acknowledge the destructive irrationality of their relentless drive to accumulate or question the narrowly individualistic view of society. For those of us who struggle against the system, however, the “ruling ideas” are an encumbrance and we need to develop very different ways of thinking.
The musings of billionaires, the pronouncements of leading politicians and the version of events that we get from the corporate media all reveal how the rich and powerful view the world and their own place in it. We need to be alert to the common ways in which they misrepresent and distort reality for their own advantage. The values and beliefs espoused and propounded by the dominant members of society become so deeply entrenched that they are taken for granted in public discourse. It is important to be aware of such hidden assumptions and how they can underlie arguments about political, social and economic issues and policies. When the mainstream media reports on workers’ strike actions, for example, the coverage is almost always focused on the question of disruption and adverse economic impacts. With rare exceptions, the grievances of the workers are neglected or discounted and the question of how much a strike victory would advance the interests of other workers is simply not considered.
Of course, no conventional media report is ever going to include a disclaimer that “this newspaper is owned by wealthy employers and, in line with their interests, this article regards the needs of working people as of little consequence, while viewing corporate profitability, narrowly conceived, as of paramount importance.” Yet, precisely this assumption informs the coverage of workers’ struggles in the corporate media.
Last month, I wrote a column for Canadian Dimension discussing the dehumanization of Palestinian lives underlying Western government attitudes and actions as well as mainstream media coverage during the unfolding genocide in Gaza. I pointed out that “a sustained process of slaughtering civilians with weapons supplied by Western governments would not be possible without an assumption that the lives of the victims are sufficiently cheap to render them expendable.” Again, no media outlet or official spokesperson would openly acknowledge this racist bias, but it is a potent factor in the West’s response nonetheless.
Selective reasoning
The approved discourse also relies heavily on highly selective forms of reasoning and evidence-gathering. The corporate media’s failure to look at events in context is key to understanding the skewed nature of their news coverage. We are living in a period when social explosions occur with great frequency, especially in the Global South. Few months go by without people in one country or another coming into the streets to protest the hardships imposed on them by Western corporations and local elites. You would have to do a fairly diligent search of the major media outlets to unearth even barebones information about the deep and longstanding grievances that engender such uprisings. For the most part, a picture of inexplicable and uncivilized riotous behaviour will shape the discourse whenever people rise up and resist their oppression.
The horrors that Israel is raining down on Gaza once again provide a compelling example. Those intellectuals, journalists and organizations who have sought to present an accurate account of the situation have driven home the message that the history of Gaza did not begin October 7, 2023, and what transpired on that day cannot be understood without considering how the Gaza Strip was created and the conditions that have been imposed on the Palestinians living there over generations, particularly in the last 17 years of Israeli blockade and siege. Yet, save for the odd piece offered up pro forma in the name of providing ‘balance,’ the mainstream media has consistently trumpeted the message that the entire ‘conflict’ is attributable to a recent unprovoked act of Palestinian brutality. Such an impressive feat has required the most dogged forms of selectivity.
The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in The Mismeasure of Man that “the invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.” With this observation, he exposed the faulty logic of many politicians and state bureaucrats, who cherry-pick evidence to support their austerity-driven approach to public policy.
You will often hear it asserted that homelessness is attributable to addiction and mental health issues. That there is a level of correlation is undeniable and significant numbers of unhoused people certainly contend with these issues in their lives. However, to fixate on this supposed explanation is to divert attention from a glaring and obvious reality. The factor that has driven the explosion of homelessness over recent years, as Margot Kushel argues, has been “the exorbitant cost of housing and the extreme shortage of housing available for the lowest-income households.” Addiction and mental health issues may make people more vulnerable to homelessness but the impacts of social cutbacks and upscale redevelopment are the primary causal factors, as unwelcome as this disclosure is to those who have driven these processes.
Flawed reasoning and self-delusion may meet the needs of the ruling strata of our society we can be hip to their game and expose their ruses to equate their interests with the common good. The occupier has to create a false version of history but the fight for liberation must paint an accurate picture. Those who profit from the production of fossil fuels are driven to conceal the terrible consequences of their actions but the struggle for a just and sustainable society must look reality squarely in the face. Understanding and truth are our best weapons against an exploitative society based on lies.
I will leave the last word to someone who challenged countless lies during his lifetime: Malcolm X. In a speech he gave in New York City in 1964, he declared,
Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else.