For me, this is the most vivid image of the bible: Isaiah is overwhelmed by remorse for the sin of having remained silent; and the angel approaches him with tongs and a blazing ember, and touches his mouth, cleansing Isaiah's lips and beginning his prophecy. A few days ago Estimated Prophet wrote a magnificent essay that has got my mind blooming with bougainvillia of fire:

The will of the people in a limitedly democratic nation should see it safeguarded from rash actions not in the majorities best interests.

Shouldn't it?

The majority of Americans grow up schooled. Could it be we are trained to blindly accept authority, groupthink, and conformity?

[...]

People don't think critically on the whole, as best as I can tell, empty phrasings flow from world leaders and are accepted. No thought of current world events, of even recent history. I used to think that perhaps reasoning must be perceived as too much work, maybe folks are disinterested. My sense now is that this phenomena is either unconscious or willful, whatever the case it is a technique to stave off cognitive dissonance. I say this because acceptance of the ludicrous, the hypocritical is practiced even by the people actually writing these pieces, well paid journalists with access to fact checkers, individuals with college degrees with a news organizations staff behind them are comfortable serving up the nonsensical articles to "We the People"- articles that fall on their faces when actually considered for just a moment, when rolled around in the mind and compared/contrasted with given world realities.

Now compare this to the guiding spirit and genius of our web log, the illustrious John Atkinson Hobson:

Imperialism, II.iii.20-21: Now, with the disdain of history and the neglect of sociological laws which this implies I am not here so much concerned as with the injurious reaction wrought upon the mind of the citizen confronted with some new event which challenges his judgment. Our rough-and-ready, hand-to-mouth, "take-what-you-can-get" politics have paralysed judgment by laming the logical faculty of comparison. Not being required to furnish to ourselves or others clear, consistent reasons for our short-range expediencies of public conduct, we have lost all habit of mental consistency, or, putting it conversely, we have developed a curious and highly dangerous aptitude for entertaining incompatible and often self-contradictory ideas and motives.

One or two extreme concrete instances will serve as illustrations of the damage done to the public intelligence by the absence of all sense of clear logical order in the conduct of affairs. At the beginning of the South African war the numerical insignificance of the Boers was regarded as an aggravation of their insolence in entering upon strife with the greatest Empire of the world. But the numerical smallness did not in the least interfere with the equally genuine belief and feeling that we were contending with a Power as large, numerically, as ourselves, which were required to support the sense of triumph when we won a victory, or to turn the edge of shame when our tiny adversary inflicted a defeat upon us. The shifts of detailed mendacity and curious invention to which we were driven in the course of the war by the necessity of keeping up this double and contradictory belief will doubtless attract the attention of the psychological historian, how the numbers alternately and automatically expanded and contracted according as it was sought to impress upon the nation the necessity of voting large supplies of troops and money, or else to represent the war as "nearly over" and as having lapsed into a trifling guerilla struggle.
[emphasis added JRM]

Now, shall my dear reader understand, at long last, why my heart burned within me when I read these words? How apt and immediate they seemed, from a distance of a century?

M furnishes the following example:

"All Syrian military and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections, for those elections to be free and fair," Mr Bush said.

"The Lebanese people have the right to determine their future, free from domination by a foreign power. The Lebanese people have the right to choose their own parliament this spring, free of intimidation."

Now, thinking critically- how were the Iraqi elections "free and fair" under US military occupation if the elections in Lebanon cannot be?

It was possible for informed politicians to maintain at one and the same time that our conduct in providing food and shelter to the families whose property we had destroyed in South Africa was an act of unprecedented generosity, and to defend the right to sell by public auction their farms in order to defray the very cost of keep which was the ground for our self-commendation. These two contentions could be uttered in the House of Commons by the same minister and accepted by the nation without any recognition of their inconsistency. Why? Simply from a practical inhibition of the faculty of comparison. A line of action is pursued from the felt pressure of some close expediency: afterwards some "reasons" must be found for it, some justification given: no attempt is made before or after the action to see it as a whole with its causes and its consequences, and so there is no clear comparison of actual motives and results. This genius of inconsistency, of holding conflicting ideas or feelings in the mind simultaneously, in watertight compartments, is perhaps peculiarly British.

As is now too obvious to overlook, it is not peculiarly British (seeing as Americans have adapted it quite splendidly) as a feature of any imperial power, anywhere, when expressing itself as it wishes to imagine itself sounding: as it were, Pecksniff in the throes of smitten righteousness.

Back to M:

Without informed judgements the citizenry can buffaloed into accepting the well crafted but not necessarily honest views of those in government who would steamroll the populace into accepting thier perspective and policy. The media is complicit in this process. Take the Presidential "Debates", a few minutes of dueling soundbites per canned subject. Afterwords we are offered opinions on style, on appearence. Nothing about the merits of policy, the actual meat of the matter.

Milton Meyer wrote about the phenomenon of a nation of citizens that uncritically believed an emotionally followed the government headed by another Time magazine "Man of the Year".

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

At one point, it seems, M takes advantage of the experience of the 20th century lacking in Imperialism (c.1902) to make his warning keener yet:

Our collective will as a nation is being steered by kneejerk emotions, not critically considered fact. Patriotism and loyalty to the leader and his minions is posited as being a good citizen, a member in good standing of the group. A comfortable follower of the dominant mode of "thought"- which requires no individual thought. Individual autonomy and authority is given up to conform, fit in, be welcomed into the fold. At what cost?

All individual passion leads to the suppression of all critical judgment with regard to the object of that passion. Beyond that, in the collective passion created by propaganda, critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment. Man becomes incapable of "separation," of discernment (the word critical is derived from the Greek krino, separate). The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda... The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication...

What the individual loses is never easy to revive. Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have been atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda has been suppressed... The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another; this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis-a-vis some event without a ready-made opinion, and obliged to judge it for himself. At the same time, propaganda presents facts, judgments, and values in such confusion and with so many methods that it is literally impossible for the average man to proceed with discernment. He has neither the intellectual capacity nor the sources of information. He is therefore forced either to accept, or reject, everything in toto.

"You have to know you are in prison to escape prison" as Gurdjieff said. Resist. Otherwise we lose our humanity as well as the basic liberties our troops are told they are dying for in Mr Bush' war of choice.

It has been remarked that Mr Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was. Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus’s purse of good sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction–post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there; but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all. His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr Pecksniff, ‘There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me.’ So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron–grey which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek though free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower and dangling double eye–glass, all tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, ‘Behold the moral Pecksniff!’
[Martin Chuzzelwit, II]