| The Myth of Public Information | 2002-01-17 19:43 14 comments |
 by Flemming FunchThere is a widespread myth underlying most media information, most analysis of the activities of governments and corporations, and most scientific debunking of anything unusual going on in the world. That is that most things are known by the public, and if anything unusual would be going on, we'd know about it. In other words, there are no conspiracies, no big things going on in secret, nothing much happening that isn't described in the official school textbooks and in the newspaper. The myth reasons that if any large number of people are expected to keep a secret, there will always be somebody who spills the beans. The problem is that this isn't true at all. Even worse, the myth is often being used in a self-referential way, so that even if somebody does spill the beans about a big secret, since the public wasn't already informed about the matter, it obviously is just a fluke and obviously not true. Now, contrary to the existence of that myth, which is never openly presented, there are lots of things that are being kept secret by large numbers of people for extended periods of time. Non-Disclosure Agreements and threats and general unbelievability can be remarkably powerful. Apple just released a new iMac computer. Now, there are dozens of websites and dozens of magazines and hundreds of industry analysts and journalists who have gone to great lengths for an extended period of time to find out what it would be like. And yet, all that was available publically on the Internet or in any trade magazine was some vague and mostly incorrect guesses. Thousands of people have been involved in the design and manufacturing of this thing, and none of them talked. Only exception was that Time magazine made a blunder and published it on their website a few hours too early. But even the prior printing of millions of copies of Time with the computer on the cover hadn't become known publically. The huge U.S. energy company Enron just went into bankruptcy as a complete surprise to the public information space. They had apparently bribed half of the U.S. Congress to give them special treatment with sizable campaign contributions, and they had persuaded a normally very respectable audit company to falsify their accounting. So, nobody knew, despite it being a publically traded company with open books. The September 11 investigation and public information is chuck-full of holes and alarming information and leads that were never followed up on in the public eye. We never heard again about the people who profited from the thing on the stock market, we didn't get any explanation to why the building with the CIA headquarters collapsed before the towers, we didn't understand why the multiple demolition experts who insisted the towers were brought down by explosives in a controlled demolition suddenly changed their minds, we heard almost nothing about the many signs of prior knowledge of the event, etc. The apparent investigation produced lots of news in the first week after the incident, and then it all died down to nothing. And the public believes that it is because we found the culprits and went off to hunt them down? The U.S. military-industrial complex is the most amazingly effective in keeping information out of the public eye. Pretty much nothing comes into the public knowledge that wasn't intended to be there, except for what is released 30 years after the fact, and still then, most of the pieces are missing. They can remain quite calm even if pieces of the secrets are hinted at on public television, because it is usually so outlandish that people mostly take it as just entertainment, and it is probably even then so far short of the mark that the real secrets remain quite safe. It is thoroughly well documented by now that there are groups that had workable extra-terrestrial technology already 50 years ago, and it still something that is very controversial for the public opinion to believe in. And just imagine what has been developed from that in the 50 years in-between that you haven't at all heard about on late night UFO shows. It is a powerful myth, however. The widespread blind belief in the general public availability of any important data is very strong. So strong that any hint to the contrary is easily ridiculed or debunked or ignored. Disbelievers in the truth of the official public picture are easily presented as naive, gullible, overly imaginative, uneducated suckers, who's views just don't stand the light of day. And nobody quite notices that the light of the day comes from a movie projector, and since everybody's staring at the movie, nobody's seeing what goes on in the projection booth, and they wouldn't believe it anyway, because it isn't in Technicolor. |