Why Western Elites Ignore Reality
How “the Narrative” has replaced Truth in our discourse — and our lives.
When I wrote my long-form piece, “How the West Descended Into Idiocy”, I sought to explain what was for me inexplicable — namely, how the entire Western elite class could be so dangerously wrongheaded about so many different things, ranging from Trump and Russiagate to Putin, Russia, and the Ukraine conflict.
I wondered: how could so many high profile media outlets and world leaders possibly be so misinformed?
I think I have found the answer — and it is terrifying.
Appearances trump all
When I first started working in Europe back in the 1980’s, my German friends, who were hardened realists, all shared a central critique of the United States. Americans, they said, did not know the difference between schein (the German word meaning “to appear”) and sein (the German word meaning “to be”). In other words, Americans were far too willing to get by on bullshit: for us, it was more important to appear to be something than it was to actually be that thing.
This was, after all, the Reagan era, when America had an actor in the White House, playing the greatest role of his life, that of a US President. With such a situation, it was easy to say that Americans were not serious; that we were all play-acting, that we were more concerned with how things looked, rather than how things actually were.
I accepted the criticism as one that was aimed at the American population in general, but I remained convinced that when it came to geopolitics, the US was still being led by clear-eyed realists and hard-nosed pragmatists who were competently steering the ship of state.
That may have been the case 40 years ago. But not anymore.
Creating a “new reality”
During the US Presidential campaign in 2004, veteran reporter Ron Suskind wrote a long-form analysis of the George W. Bush Administration for The New York Times. In that article, he introduced what I consider to be the origin of the dangerous detachment of the West’s leadership from reality.
In that seminal piece, entitled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”, Suskind related how in 2002 he had met with a “senior aide” to Bush, who had explained to him why reality did not matter anymore:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”
This, the aide said, was now quaintly out of date:
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
Moreover, the aide explained how, by constantly “creating new realities”, the hucksters and charlatans of the Bush Administration could keep one step ahead of Suskind and his “reality-based” cohorts:
And while you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Who is in the “reality-based community”?
Suskind asked himself: “Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem.”
That was then, this is now. Today, I would argue, the leaders in Washington, DC and in the capitals of Europe are no longer part of that “reality-based community”. Rather, they are all united in creating alternate realities.
Controlling the Narrative
Over the years, Western elites have come to rely on the lesson learned from the Bush Administration. George W. Bush and his neocon warmongers were, after all, able to launch a 100% illegal invasion of Iraq based on completely false assumptions about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD). In order to create support for the illegal war, the Bushies also floated stories asserting that Saddam Hussein had been responsible for the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
As The Brookings Institution explained in 2021, the Bush team was successful in creating an alternate reality when it came to Iraq:
“Consequently, the United States went to war in Iraq on a false pretense that it was somehow avenging those killed by al-Qaida. A Washington Post poll conducted two years after 9/11 dramatically illustrated the story: 69% of Americans at the time believed Saddam Hussein was “personally” involved in the 9/11 attack. Even more staggering, 82% believed Saddam provided assistance to Osama bin Laden. Both were utterly false.”
Even the “official” justification for the war, namely that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMD, persists. As late as 2015, 42% of Americans still believed that US forces had indeed found WMD in Iraq.
The lesson from Iraq was clear: the world — certainly the Western world — could be convinced of almost anything in order to justify a war, and “the Narrative” was more important than reality when it came to conducting foreign and public policy.
Mass media supports the Narrative
News outlets like The New York Times are well known for cheerleading war. Whereas the NYT may have been at one time independent, the past decades have shown the Times to be nothing more than a stenographer for the Government when it comes to foreign policy in general, and war in particular.
Similarly, The Washington Post has, over the years, become nothing more than the official mouthpiece of the CIA.
Broadcast outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS are all likewise nothing more than propaganda machines, slavishly supporting the official “Narrative” that comes out of Washington and the Military Industrial Complex.
Help from Hollywood
The ruling elites are also helped in promulgating their Narrative by popular media, movies and TV.
For example, any student of history knows that it was the USSR and the mighty Red Army that defeated Hitler’s forces in World War II. However,, over the last 70 years, Western audiences have been bombarded by movies and TV shows portraying the valiant “Yanks” defeating Nazi Germany. These works have had the effect of literally changing history in the minds of many Westerners.
In France, a poll asked people “who won WWII?” The opinions of the people changed over the years to match the false Narrative that had been pumped out of Hollywood for decades.
Beyond propaganda
In my aforementioned article, “How the West Descended Into Idiocy”, I proceeded from the assumption that the Western elites were “getting high on their own supply”, that is to say, they were believing their own propaganda about Trump, Putin, Russia and Ukraine.
I now realise that this may not be the case. In fact, it now seems more likely that the leaders of the collective West and their minions in the media are no longer content to propagandise to cover up an unpleasant reality. Rather, they now seek to make their propaganda become the NEW REALITY.
Fooling all of the people, all of the time
There is an old adage, most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that maintains:
“You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”
While this simple, straightforward idea may have been axiomatic in the 19th century, it seems not to be true today. Lincoln lived in an America that boasted a bountiful number of media outlets: every city and many towns had their own newspapers; larger cities had several different newspapers.
Media consolidation on a vast scale
In fact, in Lincoln’s 1860 there were 3000 independent newspapers operating in the United States. Today, we have only 672 major daily newspapers operating in the US, although we have over 10x the population (31 million in 1860 compared to 333 million today).
Moreover, there has been tremendous consolidation: most of those newspapers are controlled by only 7 companies.
Non-print media is the worst
For non print media, the situation is even more bleak. This is mostly die to Bill Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allowed for media consolidation on an unprecedented scale.
The result is that today, just six (6) corporations control more than 90% of the US media.
And so now it would seem that the Western elites have decided that, with the coordinated help of a fully compliant media, they can indeed “fool ALL of the people, ALL of the time”.
Creating the “Dominant Narrative”
There are many things that Westerners believe without having a verifiable or precise reason for believing them. They “just know” certain things to be true, and anyone who goes against this belief system is immediately dismissed or condemned as ignorant, or a “conspiracy theorist” or a “puppet” of some foreign power.
I explored this phenomenon in “How the West Descended Into Idiocy” but will recap some of it here.
For example, most Westerners believe the following:
Putin is a “thug” and a dictator who has his enemies assassinated;
Putin controls all the levers of state in Russia; nothing happens without his direct participation;
Putin is a megalomaniac who is bent on recreating the Soviet Union and/or the Russian Empire;
Russia is a third world backwater, a gas station masquerading as a country;
Ukrainians are blond haired, blue-eyed Europeans, and they are defenders of Western-style democracy and liberal, “open societies”.
Most of my well-educated liberal friends and family in the United States believe all of the above not only reflexively, but deeply and passionately.
Let’s examine the first case from my list. As Peter Van Buren wrote in REUTERS:
There is a near-certainty in American political speech, going back to the 1980s: When a senior United States official labels you a thug, trouble follows. “Thug” is the safest go-to word in the lexicon of American Exceptionalism.
President Obama called him [Putin] a “thug,” as did presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, who added “gangster” for good measure. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s spokesperson found fault with Putin and his whole nation, even adding an adjective: “Russia is a global menace led by a DEVIOUS thug.” One rarely hears ruffian, hooligan, vandal, hoodlum or villain, but watch out for thug.
They also believe that Trump is an immoral, incompetent megalomaniac who has deep ties to his fellow dictator, Vladimir Putin, and that Trump’s election heralds the “end of democracy” in the US.
Despite the total lack of hard evidence …
When asked to defend their opinions/perceptions, my friends and relatives in the USA have painfully little to offer. They react as if I were asking them to prove that the sky is blue. These views are hard-coded in the American left; they are axioms that everyone just “knows” to be true, like the health effects of smoking.
In this way, the support for the Ukraine war, the opposition to Trump, and the condemnation of Putin have all become shibboleths — like wearing masks to “stop COVID”. They virtue signal to others in your class that you are on board and on side.
Holding these views shows others that you are a Very Serious Person and that you embrace the common belief system propagated by the technocratic elites of Western society.
My friends and family simply cannot imagine abandoning these views, lest they be banished, shunned and set adrift on an ice flow of isolation, floating away from their chosen social tribe.
How the Narrative trumps the Truth
Nowhere is this new phenomenon of creating “alternate realities” more prevalent than the conflict in Ukraine. Russia has been objectively winning this war since early 2023, and yet Western politicians and their media minions continue to crow about how Ukraine is actually winning, and Russia is losing badly.
The IMF keeps coming out with reports showing the Russian economy is booming, and outperforming Western economies by far, and yet we are fed a host of stories about how “Russia is on the verge of collapse”.
They get away with this Narrative because they have shut down and even outlawed all Russian and Russian-leaning media outlets in Western countries. It is simply impossible to find opposing or contrasting points of view in Western mass media, and so the people are left to believe whatever the ruling elites want them to.
There is an old saying, often (incorrectly) attributed to Winston Churchill, that claims “history is written by the victors”. In the case of Ukraine, it seems obvious that no matter how the conflict ends, Western powers will simply declare themselves the winners and write the history that Western schoolchildren will learn for generations to come — much like they were able to change the perception of who really won WWII.
Declaring victory where there is none
As long as there is still a place called “Ukraine”, the West will promulgate a “David and Goliath” story about the plucky Ukrainians who defeated the big, bad, Russian bear and foiled the vile dictator and well-known “thug”, Vladimir Putin.
The dominant Narrative in the West will be that Putin was bent on conquering all of Europe, and that Ukraine was supposed to be the first domino to fall, but that the valiant Ukrainians defended their democracy and fought the evil Russians to a standstill.
Rather than admit the reality that Russia took on the combined military industrial capacity of the entire NATO alliance - and won, the story will be instead that “all of Europe owes its freedom to the brave and democratic people of Ukraine”.
In short, given the complete absence of opposing or dissenting views, the unified powers of the West will be able to overcome the reality on the ground by creating a new reality in the air.
#End.
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Very good. American elites do try to create a reality to their liking by incessantly bullshitting everyone. The thing is, they've done it so long--as you said it really escalated after 9/11/2001--that many of them actually believe it themselves.
When you think a thing too long, you start to believe that thing. That's how our brains work.
I recall Putin being quoted as saying that American officials & media lie all the time, in a surprisingly uniform way. I've since learned he was 100% correct in that assessment. It's hard to take any pride in how the West has been manipulated to believe outright lies. All the nations of the West are being stolen out from under 'the people' by a vicious elite. It's appalling.