It depends which side you’re on…
Iran and Israel are exchanging missile fire and drone strikes. This is either the existential struggle of the Jewish people made manifest, or Zionist warmongering that puts the whole word in danger of nuclear conflagration.
It depends which side you’re on.
Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, Donald Trump was having a huge military parade – either to celebrate his birthday, or the 250th anniversary of the US Army.
It depends which side you’re on.
The parade was either a massive success or a humiliating lame duck event.
It depends which side you’re on.
At the same time, the “No Kings” protests were taking place in cities all around the country. It was either the largest political protest in American history, or a massive anti-climactic non-starter.
It depends which side you’re on.
A “political assassin” allegedly killed two people in Minnesota on Saturday. He is either an ultra-right wing MAGA type, or a Democrat who worked for Tim Walz.
It depends which side you’re on.
I’m sure you get the point by now.
Noam Chomsky famously said…
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum
…and he was totally correct. But that has evolved. We’re well beyond that now. There is no longer a “spectrum” of permissible opinion, only a series of on/off switches and yes/no tickboxes. There is no longer debate, only name-calling and echo chambers.
The pick-a-side meta-narrative is all-encompassing and swamps every issue from every angle. Every breaking news story is immediately, violently and finally divided into two camps, and each camp is supplied with evidence to support their chosen point of view.
The divide is brutally policed, with each side seeing the other as barely-human functionaries of a life-destroying other.
More dangerously, not only do neither side debate the evidence of the other, but increasingly they can’t even see it. The other side probably lied and made it up, after all, that’s the kind of thing the other side does.
The final absurd zenith is when both sides use the same evidence.
A speech or a debate or a viral video clip will do the rounds and Team A will say “wow, [person we like] totally DESTROYED [person we don’t like] in this clip”, and then Team B will post the exact same thing.
An exercise in conditioning that reverses normal cause and effect. Opinion shaping perception, rather than the other way around.
Is the dress black and blue or white and gold? Your allegiance decides and shuts down the possibility you could be wrong.
But hear me out on this…
Maybe Donald Trump is neither an American hero nor a uniquely fascistic dictator leading the US to new lows, but a puppet just like every other elected official for generations.
Maybe neither Iran nor Israel is the good guy, maybe the “war” is as much a war as the “pandemic” was a pandemic.
Maybe Covid didn’t come from a lab OR a bat, maybe there was no new disease at all.
Maybe that “assassin” in Minnesota was neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and the whole thing is a psy-op designed to sow division or sell an agenda.
And maybe, just maybe, the bad guys aren’t the mass of dehumanized “other” on the opposite side of any particular fence, but rather the people who benefit from all the underlying assumptions you stop questioning when you engage in programmed binary thinking.
