A view from the Soviet socialist trenches.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related: Obama’s quest into the magic world of anti-American mythology:
There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper East Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins — equally despising “the bourgeois,” sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds. Such beliefs have often served as a veiled excuse for tyranny.
This thinking is the direct opposite of the ideal of individual liberty, on which the United States was founded and which defines this country’s exceptionalism. As such, elitist and leftist beliefs are downright un-American — a term that today has become a fighting word, used broadly by both right and left, sometimes with a completely opposite meaning. Not to be outdone, snobs and radicals have also evolved a natural loathing for American “bourgeois” principles.
But the view of America as the command center of the international capitalist conspiracy is definitely not a product of natural evolution, but rather a foreign implant going back to the days of the Cold War.
…Where’s the “imperialist propaganda” when you need it? The leftist propaganda encountered so little resistance in the land of the alleged “capitalist conspiracy” that an airbrushed version of history has almost universally replaced the truth in the media, education, and entertainment. The intended result is the widespread notion of America’s guilt. One doesn’t even need to be a leftist anymore to believe in this country’s image as a violent empire controlled by greedy capitalist oligarchies that dictate its policies.
Press, academia and the education establishment are mediocre when it comes to imparting reality and promoting critical thinking, but superlative when it comes to collectivist propagandizing.
They printed THAT on a Pyschology Today website?!!
I imagine the comments section is going to be rather lively.
I think the problem is that humans are not saints so bad examples are easy to find. Add that to the complete lack of perspective of the left (one counter example being sufficient to discredit thousands of positive examples) and you have the elitists capable of ignoring reality forever.
“Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others.
And for this we can blame Woodward & Bernstein. Thanks to them the discipline shifted from “reporting” to “journalism”. Instead of reporting events their idealist spawn felt the need to “better the world” instead of telling us what was happening in it and allowing us to make up our own minds.
The worst about about Woodward and Bernstein is that they were 20-something fronts (witting or otherwise) for their boss at the Washington Post, and for the #2 guy at the FBI (Mark Felt aka “Deep Throat”).
The “real” story (written by someone much smarter than me) is that a disgruntled current federal SES colluded with a newspaper editor to destroy a political administration.
THAT is the template, and we saw it with the CIA during the two terms of President GW Bush.
That’s a really good point Mick, but even ‘reporters’ skew our perspective by choosing what they cover. I think the only way to fix it is to embarrass the hell out of these so called journalists except they don’t seem to have any shame.
Can you even imagine the shock of the valentine’s day massacre then and our lack of sensibilities today? We don’t have that same perspective today which means we’ve lost something important I think.
I don’t know what the solution could possibly be. Perhaps something threatening our very existence in no uncertain terms? No. Not even that.
It would seem to require a groundswell from regular folk that have had enough… but do they exist in enough numbers today? Are they aware of the problem beyond a vague feeling of unease?
Have we passed the tipping point?
I thought it was engineers who had a “keen interest on bettering the world.” Most of the reporters I knew in DC (not all, most) just wanted to make a big noise. A la Woodward and Bernstein.