Have You Seen the Fnords Yet?

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. —H.L. Mencken

Not long ago I wrote about my discomfiture at seeing peoples' knee-jerk tendency to overreact when they encounter the word 'anarchy.' Even people whose fortitude is otherwise rock bottomed and copper sheathed will all too often quail when confronted with that dread word, which says more about the power of certain words that have been invested with exaggerated or even wholly different meanings over time from their original iteration. In the same piece I reiterated that we often see the manipulation of words by an established power structure to influence the thinking of the population they wish to exploit in order to entrench and solidify their own positioning as 'leaders,' in this context simply a word signifying an anointed class of individuals presuming the right to the persons and property of others.

The obvious question arising here is how mere words can gain such inordinate power. As has been noted before, one way is to consistently use them incorrectly in a targeted manner to establish them in the public's mind in the desired context. Much like the infamous 'big lie' method, if they're repeated often enough without refutation people will eventually accept the incorrect version. Well indoctrinated members of traditional groups and organizations with high status can apply quite a bit of social and peer pressure by using their positions to promote or discourage selected words, training those lower than themselves in the hierarchy to do the same, who will in turn spread the values they've absorbed in their own circles. The list goes on, but the goal is always the increase of the dominant class' control and the diminution of those of lower status. Naturally, the more that power structure controls various strategic areas of the society it oversees, the more it can influence the dissemination of data through it, and for manipulation of language, the area historically proven most effective to accomplish it have been the educational system.

I've made no secret of my loathing for America's forced education system in my essays. From its earliest Prussian-inspired militaristic/statist roots through today's hierarchical prisoner indoctrination factories, its goal all along has been the processing of young human beings into 'human resources' with skills and habits best suited to benefit the self-proclaimed industrial and political overseers who wield enormous power over the way the country operates. This is unjust for several reasons:

First, the square pegs...as I'll refer to those inclined to be 'other-directed,' or 'followers,' who generally comprise the largest segment of a population...are groomed and shaped for a preordained and limited set of square holes that are the lifestyles deemed acceptable by the engineers of the system. But that's only the visible result; keeping Frederic Bastiat's ideas of 'that which is not seen' in mind, one wonders how differently these individuals would have developed and prepared for life had they not been forced into the constraints of the mold prescribed by the system. How much creativity is plowed under this way, with critical thinking skills abandoned in favor of rote memorization? How much more diverse and fulfilling would their lives be if they were truly free to choose their own paths after experiencing a genuine education emphasizing independent thinking?

Those more cynical by nature and not apt to simply accept dogma at face value or follow orders blindly...let's call these the round pegs...bear the brunt of the machine's ire and are mercilessly attacked in an effort to force them into being square pegs. Those efforts often fail, as they must, since human beings are not malleable 'resources' whose fundamental natures as individuals cannot simply be adjusted as if they were inanimate raw materials. This results in their being ridiculed, marginalized, drugged, or incarcerated, shunted aside and isolated from the mainstream by whatever expedient means are necessary to do so. These are the type of people needed for real progress in a society, the innovators and creators, inner-directed sorts who often become artists, musicians or entrepreneurs, but are halted before ever beginning.  Instead they join the millions of other ruined and broken young people who've been left to fend for themselves in a hostile environment. Instead of fulfilling their potential, too often they end up as institutionalized wards of the State or die from the savage treatment they are consigned to, all for the 'crime' of being inconvenient to the workings of the machine.

And a machine it is, inflexible as steel, merciless as any mindless mechanical contraption when a person gets caught in its gears. The 2009 film The War on Kids more than succeeds in convincingly pointing this out. The system is without a doubt becoming more atavistic, subjecting ever more of its captive charges to naked State aggression; treating the least behavioral anomaly as a serious 'disorder' requiring the administration of strong psychoactive drugs...drugs that often have dreadful side effects...or crimes worthy of arrest and confinement, often involving violent assaults against young and helpless victims. As public hysteria over drugs and violence metastasizes, the tragically ironic result is the massive increase of these very evils inflicted upon the young by the State, often with the loud approval of the populace who claim to care the most for the children.

To my mind, this bizarre situation has occurred in large measure due to the deification of the State for so long that is part and parcel of this selfsame educational system. As I've said before, since the State has indoctrinated people so well with its peculiar brand of non-logic, any trouble or obstacles they encounter in life caused by the State itself are often simply overlooked by these folks as if they didn't exist, blinded as they are by State worship. Along with aggrandizement of the State, children are taught to view many concepts with fear and mistrust, over time developing this reaction to almost anything controversial. This is useful to the State, since when people are distracted by a constant low level of fear and anxiety they tend to avoid critical thinking or proactive action, preferring to let others, usually 'experts' approved by the State, deal with most issues.

Still think the kids are alright? You might change your mind after seeing this:

In The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson that I encountered in my youth, the authors introduce the allegorical device of 'fnords' to make this fairly complex concept easily understandable. As the protagonist who's begun market anarchist Hagbard Celine's deconditioning training skims a newspaper:

I saw the fnords.

The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia and the U.S. in the UN General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the Russian delegate I read a quite distinct "Fnord!" The second lead was about a debate in Congress on getting the troops out of Costa Rica; every argument presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another "Fnord!" At the bottom of the page was a Times depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and the increasing use of gas masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing chemical facts were interpolated with more "Fnords."

Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: "Your heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. You will look at the fnord and see it. You will not evade it or black it out. You will stay calm and face it." And further back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on,

IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .

I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords. This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex was to experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically called) whenever encountering the word "fnord."The second conditioned reflex was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to feel a general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course, was to attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in themselves anyway. Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers, dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen melted, and I felt genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining, watch their sons hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their security . . . Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. It was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the invisible fnords.

I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to somebody who hadn't been de-conditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would he or she say? They'd probably read the word before or after it. "No this word," I'd say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But would their panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to try the experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject. The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked memory of what they've done to us in converting us into good and faithful servants...

I'm envious of minds capable of inventing such a brilliant device; this passage condenses a long, involved explanation into a short, simple one without losing the subtlety and scope of the phenomenon's effects. It takes public schooling years to produce the sort of unthinking reactions in people as Wilson and Shea's fanciful fnords do, and the effect is nearly the same, making their allegory handy for communicating the damage public education inflicts on the young to those who haven't considered it before.

The concept of fnords is useful for understanding the effects of mass media on the adult populace too, most of whom were indoctrinated by the same mandatory public education system themselves. Many people are familiar with the use of buzzwords and talking points by the mainstream media, but viewed in the light of this paradigm it can be seen that they can have a far greater influence on people when their meaning has been augmented by those skilled in manipulating words for public consumption. Hardly a new phenomenon, propaganda is a long established tool for influencing public opinion. One of my favorite quotes on the subject dates back almost fifty years, when Eric Sevareid, one of the pioneers of broadcast journalism and one intimately acquainted with the power of words, said in his collection of essays published in 1964:

“The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. It is the manufacture, refinement and distribution of anxiety.”

The whole structure of this 'distribution of anxiety' has changed drastically since the widespread adoption of the Internet by so many Americans over the last couple of decades, both in the speed with which it can be distributed as well as its reach. At this point in time we're getting close to seeing the results of a generations' worth of Internet influence as millions of young Americans reach the age of majority, and I'm seeing some very positive signs. There seem to be more articulate and informed young people coming onto the scene who are more constructively cynical than previous generations, and I suspect that this is largely due to the influence of the Internet as well as the widespread increase in home schooling by parents distrustful of the public education system. The reaction of the government to both of these is telling: it fears both because both are very effective in reducing its control of both the education of the young and the information available to all. You don't need to look hard to see the evidence of this, the government's thinly veiled attempts to control the Internet in the recent SOPA, PIPA and ACTA pieces of legislation along with its parallel attempts to fight home schooling say it all, and the obvious resistance of people to these is encouraging.

Words do have power, but how that power is used makes all the difference. America is at a critical point in its history, already well down the road to tyranny, first with the introduction of the PATRIOT Act and most recently with the passage of the Bill of Rights-shredding NDAA. Its industrial capacity is at a low ebb and continues to decline, stifled by thousands of pettifogging regulatory obstacles that never stop multiplying, only assuring that the record levels of unemployment will keep rising at the same time the economy accelerates toward meltdown. Worst, our future, our young people, are being cheated, their hopes and prospects withered by a cruel forced education system that isn't content with merely limiting and directing their lives to serve its own ends, but has taken to literally devouring them, body and soul.

It will only get worse unless we stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated by those who distort and magnify those words into weapons to inspire panic and cow us into submission. For a start, try looking with a more critical eye at those headlines...if you're quick you might just see the fnords yourself.

Image Credit: frankenstoen/CC BY 2.0