The unfolding of the inevitable

But government neither subsists nor arises because it is good or useful, but solely because it is inevitable.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905 - 1906)

A hopelessly drunk man climbs into a bath of baked beans at a wild party. Everyone else is drunk to and nobody notices while the guy in the bath drowns in baked beans. The story makes headlines all around the world.

A prominent UK cabinet minister is accused of directing government contracts towards his personal friends over a number of years. Naturally the story causes outrage and eventually the minister resigns.

Environmental activists rope themselves high up on an oil company skyscraper but one of them falls to his death. His family sues the oil company for billions of dollars.

Three invented stories, but not unfamiliar in their general appeal to mass media.  They will fade quickly from the public arena as other stories unfold. Yet we focus on them for now because the media temporarily direct our attention to them. It’s what they do.

All very familiar, but governments have to govern and to do that with reasonable success they have to exert considerable control over public perceptions. Effective government would be one way to do that. Propaganda is easier and vastly more popular.

Our sense of what is important in the public arena is largely dictated by what is most available for discussion, comment or amusement. That is where the mainstream media squat – directing our attention to what they make available. Directing our attention to the opinions they make available too.

As prosperity and the internet have both expanded over recent decades, the governing classes and the mainstream media both seem intent on preventing uncontrolled sources of information from seeping into the public arena. Otherwise, the peasants may stray beyond the narrative fences erected by major herders. As many do stray, but clearly many do not.

There is an obvious government fear that faith in official narratives could become even weaker than it is already. The favoured responses are censorship, psychological manipulation and attacks on sceptics or anyone else who looks over the fence.

Senior government bureaucrats obviously wish to be the arbiters of how much government we can be forced, persuaded or conditioned to accept. To achieve that they need popular apathy and they get it, but why is there so much of it? Perhaps because many people see government activity as the unfolding of the inevitable.