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Understanding the Mechanics of Political and Corporate Lies

Thursday, November 13, 2014 2:35

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(Before It's News)

12th November 2014

By Ethan Indigo Smith

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” ~ George Orwell

As with most societal dynamics, there are various approaches and thought-processes we can employ to help us make sense of the unpredictable nonsense that constitutes today’s politics and corporate spin.

There are four forms of political lies.

Those involved in politics – the politicians, reporters and corporate lobbyists – are constantly lying. We all know it, we just don’t all appreciate the scope of it. Of course, there is outright lying which might be done in any number of ways, including complete conjuration and outright elimination of important information. However corporate heads, politicians and their faithful media normally prefer more nuanced presentations to their lies — so it pays to understand just how they go about it.

Four Forms of Political Lies

There are four basic types of political lies, which immediately correlate to the four basic forms of arithmetic.

Like all effective lies, each type involves some nugget of truth.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s use as an example the political rhetoric surrounding the safety of nuclear energy:

The first type of lie is the addition of information. Sometimes the addition of a small bit of information can change the story entirely.For example: yes the ailing Fukushima reactor is still spewing radioactive pollution… but did you know, according to nuclear industry supporters, low level exposure to radiation is actually good for you?
The second type of lie is the subtraction of information. The removal of small key components can result in entirely different meaning. For example: with the nuclear site in Miami operating dangerous above standard ‘safety’ limits, the regulator temporarily increased the limit, averting an “emergency” by subtraction.
The third type of lie is multiplication of information. Exaggerations of situations connected with the story as well as exaggerations of extraneous information are included in the presentation to dilute it.
The fourth type of lie is division of information. The facts are interlaced with disconnects and the significance of information is separated or underplayed. To exemplify the third and fourth types: nuclear industry advocates claim nuclear energy to be ‘clean’ and ‘safe’. To support this belief (not fact), they exaggerate the relevance of nuclear’s low carbon emissions in comparison to other energy systems while ignoring or downplaying the permanent environmental destruction their nuclear waste causes and discrediting the science that clearly proves radiation exposure = cancer and death.

Sure, this mixed up mathematics, irregular logic, circular reasoning and ill rhetoric is sometimes just due to a lack of information, combined with an unreasonable unwillingness to admit one doesn’t know everything. But institutional leaders and media do this constantly and intentionally. Given how commonly such twisted representations are embedded in modern politics, one can only assume that, more often than not, we are witnessing the cover-up of a web of implicit agendas which, given their secrecy, clearly run counter to the purposes of community governance and information dissemination.

There is no wild “conspiracy theory” here, just a matter of linking the dots. Those with the greatest access to information in our oligarchical society are correspondingly the greatest liars to our society. That is how oligarchies are built – not by gaining the explicit agreement of the people to an inequitable ‘pyramid’ society, but by the covert and gradual creation of illusions to which the people progressively succumb. Oligarchs employ the addition, subtraction, division and multiplication of information to influence the minds of its society, gain its ongoing “consent” to remain at the bottom of the illusory pyramid.

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