I spent most of my life wondering how the consensus picture of the world can be so at odds with what even widely available information shows to be true. Nothing done in response to 9/11 had anything to do with making people safer or less afraid – often quite the opposite – and that was never a secret – so how can we have failed to seriously discuss it from that day to this?
Herman & Chomsky go into the fine detail of how that works, but broadly, I’ve come to think it’s about who has the power to change the subject. The establishment doesn’t need to lie or brainwash or silence people. It’s fine if everyone knows they’re doing bad stuff. All that matters is that everyone isn’t talking about the same outrage at the same time. Because it takes work to get millions of people focused on a single topic, and when a topic doesn’t serve the establishment’s interests, they simply… don’t make the effort.
It’s not that we’re goldfish. We just have more things to care about than we can think about at once. We know CO2 is more important than plastic straws, or that healthcare is more important than China owning TikTok. But we can only engage with the conversation people are having right now, and that’s chosen by a very few people.
The War “on” Terror is the cynical acme of this. The security establishment recognised in 9/11 a psychic cattle prod that could derail any thoughtful objection, and in months they shoved through a wish list of authoritarian agendas that would have taken them decades to distract us from otherwise. More thoughtful responses to 9/11 didn’t have to be censored; there was enough hysteria to wash away a thousand of them.
