Reforming Politics: The Problem of “Manufacturing Consent or Obedience” Requires Truthful Speech
A recent post someone railed against politics without recognizing “The problem of manufacturing consent” – or under tyranny, the problem of manufacturing obedience.
Unfortunately like many he is missing the point: politics is necessary for the formation of the spectrum of obedience to consent. And he’s presuming it isn’t possible to constrain politicians to truthful reciprocal and moral limits when addressing the polity (market) when in public, to the public, in matters public.
This is a common conservative failing: if the conservative does not understand what to do, claim the problem is unsolvable. Or, worse, which is almost universal among conservatives, and is responsible for conservative political factions: “whatever I understand (a hammer) is what I will propose as the solution (a nail)”. This is why (a) conservatives cannot ally as easily as consumptives (progressives) and (b) why conservative initiatives almost always fail and (c) why previous solutions came out of libertarians and classical liberals and NOT conservatives.
One must sell. Politics is the art of sales of consent or obedience necessary for organizing populations in the production of commons. And the only value of societies and polities is this concentration of human attention, effort, and resources to produce commons which provide discounts on everything to all despite whatever price is required.
Politics is merely a market at large scale trying to sell the public a portfolio of possible costs and returns. The fact that the public vastly varies in capacity to comprehend requires pragmatisms. And worse, means that the message must appeal to the median of the distribution of the ability of the polity. Ergo the greek and roman aristocracy’s legendary political speeches, those of the founding fathers (the only equivalent), followed by postwar mass media and mass democracy and the total loss of aristocratic responsibility by their replacement with middle and proletarian class politicians, and the utter failure of credentialism in the bureaucracy.
The solution of course is to constrain political speech to the truthful (testifiable) reciprocal (ethical and moral) fully accounting for costs and externalities (full accounting), and prohibiting pseudoscientific claims about humanity (human marginal indifference).
This would effectively end the problems we all complain about and also end the cultural divide – as the left is dependent upon lying and pseudoscience as much as the right is dependent upon moralizing.
So, we have a market for the suppression of lying called the courts, and we merely need to facilitate the suppression of this lying and fraud and pseudoscience such that political speech is prohibited from it’s industrialization of lying over the past few centuries.
Of course, we ‘scienced’ lying such that it can be embeded in law, and political speech constrained to the truthful reciprocal and fully acounted. So the technical side is solved.
It’s the political salesmanship prior to enacting it that’s going to be the problem. 😉
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Natural Law Institute
Source date (UTC): 2025-05-14 18:20:03 UTC
Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/1922718567637909536
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