Uninformed and faux-informed
Our last column focused on Mercury, the planet of intelligence. We looked at how tricky it is to truly honor Mercury in America today, given that the current societal climate does not encourage it. What would it look like to be driven by genuine curiosity, undeterred by cultural constraints?
I have said that intelligence is comprised of the instincts with which we were born, combined with the knowledge at our disposal. If Mercury is our instinct to inform ourselves (stronger in some people than in others, but present at birth in every one of us: every chart has Mercury somewhere), then from a Mercurial point of view, our choice is clear: we take advantage of our innate curiosity, or we do not. In previous “America in Transition” columns I argued against dualism as an overused ploy; but at this point I am proposing that if there is a dualism that makes any Mercurial sense, it is this: one can either be informed or uninformed.
This particular either/or should be an obvious place to begin if our goal is to enhance our intelligence. But it is not at all obvious to most Americans. The point that one can either know what one is talking about, or not, is obscured by great honking claims about "an opinion being just an opinion" and its blithely righteous corollary that all opinions are equal. Unfortunately, this worthy-sounding argument ignores the reality of propaganda, a nasty phenomenon Americans are taught to believe exists in other countries but “not in a democracy like ours.”
Yet if we can achieve, if only momentarily, sufficient distance from these subjective nationalistic assumptions, most of us will concede that throughout history governments have used propaganda and censorship to greater or lesser degrees. This is because people in power have a stake in establishing conventional opinion (in astrology, consensus thinking is governed by Saturn, the planet associated with the concept of normality. This is a point to which we will return.)
Political leaders want the public to believe certain things, and they do not want them to believe certain other things. A government will use its media arm to carefully render a certain point of view “normal”, while other points of view will get marginalized, penalized or worse. In this country, those who refute the official story line are no longer burned at the stake (
; they are merely denied air time and made fun of by Bill O’Reilly. But this is a difference of degree, not of substance. The more tyrannized a people are, the more Mercurial discourse will be suppressed.
A workaday example of the media’s faux-informing is the “both sides presented” gambit that we get from Fox News, a network whose political links to the current administration are common knowledge and involve immense financial stakes. Such “news” programs, with their much-touted adversarial guest debaters whose virulent opposition is supposed to offer proof of the station’s fairness and balance, have been dishearteningly successful in distracting viewers from the fact that a critical third thing—the truth—is nowhere in evidence. (9)
It is an ingenious trope. By setting up the discussion in a way that excludes the truly pertinent information, ideas are pre-empted before they can even coalesce into questions in the viewer’s mind. Framing a debate in terms of “whether the Iraqi government is stepping up to the plate or not”, for example, utterly precludes questions about whether Iraq hasa government right now—that is, a governing body other than the United States (the current group nominally in charge of Iraq can’t even choose their own military leaders without Washington’s approval). Framing the debate in such a way pre-empts any discussion about whether an occupied country is obliged to meet the criteria spelled out by its occupiers.
Most absurd of all is the absence, in all this talk of “winning” this (undeclared) war, of the question "what would 'winning' mean"? (10) The unacknowledged spin of the mainstream news effectively shuts out the only questions that would render any of the other questions meaningful. When we step outside of the bubble of reality created and maintained by the corporate media, its take on the “news” is so loopy as to fly in the face of Mercurial logic.
The goal of a person who wishes to use her Mercury fully must be to identify propaganda when we see it and to step out of its shadow.
