The System Cannot Survive The Truth

The crisis of reality

Israel recently recalled its envoy to Madrid after Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez said he “seriously doubted” Israel was complying with international law as it bombards Gaza.

This was meek criticism. International human rights lawyers at the UN say Israel is not complying with international law and cannot claim self-defence.

Human rights lawyers have in fact been saying this for decades.

But because all we’ve ever heard is enthusiastic cheering from the west for Israel’s massacre of Palestinians, Sanchez’s words sound strong. Israel couldn’t handle a statement approximating the truth.

Israeli officials have also said the head of the UN is a danger to world peace for calling for peace. And also that he supports Hamas because he has condemned Israel’s slaughter.

We are in a crisis of reality. On Israel. And on so much else.

On the one hand there is the reality fed to us by power elites. On the other, the reality suggested by what sociologists call brute facts.

The former is essential for the maintenance of the system. The latter is mere inconvenience.

For the elites, a reality exists beyond things that are actually real. And they need us to believe it too.

At the heart of this crisis is the need to deny brute facts to uphold greater, more important truths.

In the case of Israel, the greater truth is that the west needs Israel geopolitically as a client state in a strategically important region.

To say the brute facts out loud (Israel is an expansionist, apartheid, ethno-state) would threaten this arrangement, which has become the greater truth. In service of this truth, outrageous lies must be told.

In this way we can see how charges of misinformation become worthless.

There is no greater misinformation than to say babies have been beheaded when they haven’t, or that they’ve been cooked in ovens when they haven’t, only because that lie serves the greater truth.

Our leaders talk about the dangers of misinformation, when they are its pre-eminent purveyors.

The pandemic is over was another lie serving a greater truth.

The greater truth is that the economy can’t survive an ongoing pandemic. So the lie becomes essential for business-as-usual.

Or, to be more accurate, taking action that moves us closer towards a world in which the pandemic is over, is too expensive for capital owners. Both in financial and social terms. It’s too expensive to clean the air and too intrusive to consumer capitalism to implement a testing system.

The lie, then, becomes essential to uphold a greater truth: the economy and its owners as they exist must survive by any means necessary. Even if this means a new higher baseline of excess death. Even if this means we all die younger.

We saw more evidence of this when it was revealed the UK government blocked the release of a new covid infection report by its own health agency because they didn’t want bad news about infection rates to upset people’s Christmas cheer. Originally due out this week, it’s likely not to be published until January.

They want us ignorant, walking blindly into a viral buzz saw for capitalism.

For elites, brute facts rarely serve a useful purpose. They are narrow and geeky, inconveniences to be washed away with propaganda and PR to enable the greater truth to shine through. A truth that serves strategic, national and capitalist interests. Which, I have no doubt, the elites convince themselves are in our interests too.

(In some way, they are. We live in nationalist, capitalist states. Untangling this prisoner-jailer interconnectedness will be essential to our future. But that’s another article).

This is also the time of year when another lie must be told for a greater truth to live.

The lie that fossil fuels are compatible with a liveable future.

This week the oil man running the climate conference in Dubai said that there is no scientific basis for phasing out fossil fuels to limit global warming to 1.5C.

A gigantic lie. The science could not be clearer. Even if we still have a chance of limiting warming to 1.5C (highly unlikely), the only way we can get close is to kick fossil fuels out of the power system asap.

But once again, the lie is necessary to serve the greater truth: fossil fuels are integral to the system as it exists. Ending them ends the system itself.

For the system to survive, so must fossil fuels. So must covid. So must Israel’s slaughter. And to survive, they must be branded harmless, worthy even.

Living within a parallel reality has become the only way to prevent the system from collapsing.

We have entered an era in which ever-more desperate, flimsy and transparent propaganda is required to maintain elite grip on the system as it exists.

Do we see how incredibly dangerous all of this is?

Saying that the UN chief supports terrorism for stating the basics of human rights law means we may as well do away with those laws.

Saying a pandemic is over when it isn’t means we may as well do away with the idea there was ever a pandemic at all.

Saying fossil fuels can coexist in a climate safe world means we may as well do away with the idea of climate change itself.

Changing the system to acknowledge the reality of a pandemic, or an ecological crisis or a western-backed apartheid state, would detonate the foundations of the system.

In this way, the system’s very survival has become contingent on turning away from the truth.

Let’s just say it: this is how civilisations collapse. Objectively.

Elites ignore reality in favour of a pattern of behaviour that supports the existence of their system, however corrupt and rotten and bound to failure it is.

Is this the fate that awaits us?

The cracks are already beginning to show, and one day the dam will break.

Physical reality cannot be denied in perpetuity.

Things that are actually real always, ultimately, end up determining events.

You can’t run a system on lies forever.