November 2020 – Page 2 – Simon Sheridan

Propaganda School Part 2: The Passive Voice

Part of my interest in the increase in propaganda that has happened in the last decades is because I am just old enough to remember what the media was like before the internet came along and almost destroyed its business model. When I was university, I toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist and did a couple of years of student journalism at the university radio station. Even though it was a student organisation, the work was taken very seriously because most of the students knew that they were creating a portfolio that would be crucial in securing them a job as a journalist later on. They were right. Several of the people I worked with at the station are now professional journalists in the Australian media.

One of the things we learned as student journalists was that good journalism is all about stories and stories rely on sources. The journalist’s job is to find the story and let the people involved tell it. Climbing through the hierarchy of journalism is in large part about getting access to better sources and better stories. As student journalists, we tried and failed to get interviews with certain members of Parliament or other high profile people but I did once get an interview with the well-known Greens politician, Bob Brown. His party, of course, relied on the student vote and so he was willing to talk to us. That’s how it goes. You start off at the bottom on a student radio station and, if you climb the ladder high enough, one day you might be interviewing the Prime Minister and dealing with stories of national importance.

Good journalists will always quote their sources where they can or at least state that the source must be kept secret. Entire movies and television shows have been made about the dramatic cases where the source must be kept anonymous for their own protection and how the journalist is pressured to betray their ideals to reveal the source. That’s how important sources are in journalism. Good journalists should also provide both sides of the story (this is actually a legal requirement in Australia) and so articles should usually contain at least two opposing views. For example, if there is something controversial happening in industrial relations, you get a quote from a union official and from a government official. That’s known as balanced journalism.

Journalists are supposed to report just the facts and the facts needed to be verifiable. Much like with a scientific paper, if you make a statement in your journalism piece, there should be a reference for it. In the rare case that you make a statement without a reference, you should state that it is opinion e.g. ‘the ABC believes that…’.

The point is clear: sources are important and good journalism should always state its sources.

That is where the passive voice comes into the equation because it’s a syntactic structure in the English language that explicitly hides the subject. Therefore, it can be used to make statements without being clear about who is making the statement. Here are some examples of sentences where the active voice is transformed into the passive:

“He believed the politician was lying” –> “It was believed the politician was lying”

“They discussed the matter” –> “The matter was discussed”

“The government passed the law” –> “The law was passed”

Syntactically, the writer who want to use the passive voice can add the subject of the sentence back as follows:

“The law was passed by the government.”

As educated readers of news and propaganda, we should be very suspicious whenever we see passive voice in a media article. As we will see shortly, the passive voice can be used to make claims that have no source and therefore are either distorting or even fabricating the news. Whenever we see the passive voice, we should always ask the question “by who/whom?” and make sure the article answers our question.

Before we get to today’s examples, there’s one other linguistic usage which, although not technically the passive voice, functions in the same way: the use of plural nouns.

One of the things we see a lot of these days in the media are phrases like “observers noted…”, “scientists agree…”, “experts say….”. We should be very suspicious of such plural nouns which denote amorphous, indefinite groups. A journalist is supposed to get a statement from a real expert or scientist. It takes time to do that. Maybe the journalist will have to contact half a dozen scientists before they find one who is willing and able to be interviewed. But that is the job of a journalist. That is why they get paid. Simply stating “scientists say” is at best lazy journalism and at worst propaganda.

With all that in mind, let’s have a look at an article liberally peppered with both plural nouns and the passive voice. This one from the RT.

The headline reads:

‘MaidenGate’: Twitter warriors allege US election fraud committed by hijacking of changed names…others label claim a ‘conspiracy’

We have two plural nouns in the headline alone. It’s a battle between twitter warriors and others. What exactly is a twitter warrior? And who on earth are others?

Things don’t get much more concrete in the first sentence of the article where we hear that ‘tens of thousands of people have reacted’ and ‘some believe’.

Later, there is a formal example of the passive voice in the phrase ‘the hashtag #MaidenGate was launched late on Monday’. Launched by who exactly?

Of course, this is just a very silly article that is nothing more than a report about what happened on twitter on a Monday evening. For many years, mainstream media avoided referencing twitter because they knew that twitter was a big threat to established media enabling, as it does, the instant dissemination of news around the world. The media had the problem of needing to verify the facts before publishing. Twitter users have no such compunction and therefore ‘news’ spreads faster on twitter. A large part of the decline in traditional media standards is driven by this need for professional media to keep pace with social media.

So, media avoided mentioning twitter for as long as it could but then realised twitter wasn’t going away. It is now very common to see media articles referencing tweets or, as in the case of this RT article, an entire report which might as well be a paid advertisement for twitter. If a piece of journalism can be judged based on the weight of its sources, using random twitter accounts as your source is surely one of the lowest form of journalism. You’d get more reliable information polling the patrons at the local pub ten minutes before closing time on a Friday night.

So, yes, this RT article is rubbish journalism. But the technical elements are there in the use of both plural nouns and the passive voice. By asking the question ‘who’, we see that this whole article is nothing more than a twitter storm-in-a-teacup and can be safely consigned to the garbage can where it belongs.

However, the passive voice can be a lot more consequential. Let’s now look at a more serious example of the use of those same techniques.

In Part 1 of this series, we saw this article in the DW which was trying to smear the Querdenker group by associating them with fringe political parties. That’s a serious allegation and, in order to make it, the DW used the passive voice to make assertions without any source at all.

“…many were shocked to see tens of thousands of people regularly gathering around the country as a movement known as “Querdenker” (“lateral thinkers”) built momentum.”

Who are many? Why were they shocked? The DW does not tell us.

“…the Querdenker movement (and associated demos by smaller groups) has been marked by an unlikely alliance of far-right and far-left fringes, as well as a handful of conspiracy theorists.”

Marked by who? The DW does not tell us.

“The movement’s commitment to Germany’s democratic order was also questioned in late August…”

Questioned by who? The DW does not tell us.

This is serious stuff. If you are a member of the Querdenker, you now have the state sponsored media in Germany giving its readers the impression you are a fringe political group. It does so quoting no sources whatsoever, not even anonymous twitter users. In a court, you have a right to know your accuser. But when a media outlet reports on you using the passive voice, your accuser is unknown.

So, we see that the passive voice is a potentially dangerous tool that can go beyond sloppy journalism and into outright defamation. As readers, we need to be very cognizant of its use. Whenever we see the passive voice or amorphous plural nouns we should always ask the question “by who?” and if the journalist does not tell us we should suspicious of either their competence or their motives.

Reader Exercise

Here is yet another twitter-driven storm-in-a-teacup non-story but I thought this might be fun, in particular for international readers. Check out this BBC article which relates to an occurrence in Australian politics that happened this week. The story refers to a ‘bonk ban’ which was implemented a couple of years ago by a political party in Australia. For those who don’t know, ‘bonk’ is Australian/British slang meaning have sex with. The Prime Minister of Australia interrupted a colleague to object to the use of the word ‘bonk’ by a journalist. His objection seems fair enough to me. They were, after all, at parliament house and ‘bonk’ is a mildly inappropriate word in a formal setting. But, of course, the story got twisted somehow into a gender relations controversy. Strange that the BBC would run it high on their front page. I would have thought they have more pressing problems over there right now.

In any case, there are a few examples of both the passive voice and plural nouns used in the article. So, for this week’s exercise, have a read of the piece and find where they are. Note, the headline is also in the passive voice but because of the use of syntactic elision this is not so obvious. Write out the headline as a full English sentence in order to see that it is in the passive voice. Whenever you see the passive voice, ask yourself the question ‘by who?’ and check that the article provides the answer for you.

Postscript

This series of posts will be more fun if readers can contribute their own examples. Feel free to comment with any juicy examples of the passive voice you find.

All posts in this series:

Propaganda School Part 1: Guilt by Association

One of the primary functions of propaganda is to create in-groups and out-groups. Almost by definition, propaganda is meant to be consumed by an in-group which is the ‘us’ while the content of the propaganda is about the out-group ‘them’. The in-group is not explicitly stated but rather implied by editorial position and the demographics of the viewership. This was once a lot of more obvious than it is these days. For example, it was once the case that there was a newspaper specifically target at different segments of society, often a particular class of people. The newspapers in Britain still have some of this old fashioned delineation to an extent and there are still a lot of different newspapers in circulation there. Thus, a reader of The Spectator is expected to share certain views as are readers of The Sun and of The Times and so on. In the same way, a viewer of Fox News in the US is expected to differ ideologically from a viewer of CNN.

Given an implied in-group, propaganda then must define the out-group who are going to be portrayed in a less than flattering light. One of the primary ways to do this is to invoke the association fallacy and more specifically guilt by association. That is, the propagandist takes an individual or group that they want to define as the out-group and associates them with a label, stereotype or image that is negative. One of the more common ways this is done in modern propaganda is to call somebody ‘right wing’ to distinguish them from an implied in group that is ‘left wing’. If you want to make the portrayal even more negative, you call them ‘far right’ and if you want to go nuclear you call them ‘fascist’. The same dynamic exists for right-leaning in-groups where the nuclear option involves calling somebody from the out-group a ‘communist’.

Just flat out calling somebody a nasty word is, however, a little crude. That kind of thing might be acceptable on social media but not in the professional media where things must be done with more subtlety. Let’s have a look at that more subtle method now courtesy of a recent article in the Deutsche Welle (DW) English edition.

As an aside, the DW will probably provide a large amount of content for this series of posts containing, as it does, a large amount of juicy propaganda. Surprisingly, the DW is the government funded media outlet in Germany. It might as well be funded by Davos billionaires as its editorial position is that of the globalist elite. Therefore, one of the primary out-groups for DW is any kind of populist politics which threatens the prestige and power of the globalists. During the corona event in Germany a group that sort of fits that description appeared out of nowhere. They call themselves the Querdenker (‘lateral thinkers’) and have been organising protest rallies. Let’s have a look at an article about one such rally.

The article we’ll be looking at can be read here – https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-germany-braces-for-violent-anti-lockdown-protests/a-55513848

One of the counter intuitive things about the massive increase in propaganda in the last couple of decades is that it’s never been easier to verify facts for yourself. Naturally, the Querdenker have their own website. They look like an interesting group and claim their members include “artists, musicians, lawyers and doctors.” This seems to be true from their videos, which include a singer singing a song to the crowd at a protest. You can have a look at the website here. Even if you don’t speak German, you can get some kind of feel for the type of people who represent the Querdenker. They look pretty normal to me. Another German newspaper, the FAZ , reports on a university study that finds the Querdenker to be an “amorphous and complex” movement.

Sounds pretty cool to me. I’d love to see more mass demonstrations by lateral thinkers. I’d like to go to one myself but where I live we are not allowed to demonstrate at the moment. In Germany, the courts have ruled it unconstitutional for the government to extinguish the right to protest, something that should give all Australians pause for thought given that our government and our courts have ruled the other way.

In any case, it seems that the Querdenker are a diverse group of people who simply disagree with lockdowns and forced mask wearing. This shouldn’t be a great surprise as, at least in my experience, opposition to corona measures cuts across the usual political boundaries. Two examples from Australia stand out in my memory. One was a folk singer from Byron Bay and another was the wife of a famous football player. Hardly the usual suspects when it comes to dissenting political viewpoints. However, both were duly mobbed on social media for expressing their opinion.

Given this background, how does the DW portray the Querdenker to their readers? They do it using guilt by association and there are three primary groups that DW wants to associate with the Querdenker as we can see in the following quote:

“On the streets, the Querdenker movement (and associated demos by smaller groups) has been marked by an unlikely alliance of far-right and far-left fringes, as well as a handful of conspiracy theorists.”

Note the phrase marked by. This is an example of the passive voice. Another prime technique of propaganda that we’ll look at in a future post.

Out of a crowd of tens of thousands, the DW has somehow picked out just these three groups which, in their own words, represent a ‘handful’ of those present. Just a coincidence? Not a chance. This is a prime example of guilt by association. The DW wants their readers to associate the Querdenkers with fringe political groups. It reinforces this in its choice of photographs to represent the protestors. The main photo at the top of the article features a protestor holding a sign mentioning “forced vaccination, 5G and “Connection of Humans – AI” (presumably signifying the ‘conspiracy theorist’ demographic) while further down the page there is a video of a man holding a nationalist flag who no doubt represents the ‘far right fringe’. The DW could have chosen photos of the speakers who actually represent the Querdenker. They could have chosen a video of the folk singer singing to the crowd about freedom. But they chose those photos.

That is how guilt by association works. The Querdenker look to be a fairly representative sample of the German population in general but the DW wants its readers to believe they are made up a fringe political groups and conspiracy theorists. It does that using text and photo. The right-wing association fallacy is very common in Germany due to the obvious historical connotation it has there. And, of course, conspiracy theorist is fast becoming the most overused phrase in English and pretty much denotes anybody who questions the government narrative. Ironic that it should get applied in a derogatory fashion to a group called the lateral thinkers who self identify as people who will question the dominant narrative.

Reader Exercise

Guilt by association works by either associating an individual with an undesirable group (eg. ‘he has been supported by far right groups’) or by using an undesirable individual to represent a group. The DW used the latter tactic by having the individual carrying a nationalist flag represent the Querdenker.

Photographs are one of the easiest and commonest ways to establish guilt by association. Have a look at this report from the Australian national broadcaster (ABC) about the US election and notice the photographs chosen to portray Biden and Trump supporters respectively. What associations is the ABC trying to create for Biden and Trump supporters? What does this say about the ABC’s editorial position on the two presidential candidates and their supporters?

Postscript

This series of posts will be a lot more fun if readers can contribute. Feel free to post in the comments with any juicy examples of guilt by association you find in the media.

All posts in this series:

Propaganda School: Introduction

Over on one of my favourite blogs, John Michael’s Greer ecosophia, the topic of propaganda came up this week. I had been taught about propaganda in high school English class and, having taken a natural liking to the subject, it’s been a hobby of mine ever since to pick apart the techniques of propaganda that are used in the media and by politicians. From a couple of remarks I’ve seen, it seems that high schools in the USA also used to teach their students how to recognise propaganda but this doesn’t seem to be taught anymore. That’s a real shame because in the last couple of decades our exposure to propaganda has escalated massively with the information technology revolution. Everybody now carries a (potential) tool of propaganda in their pocket with them at all times. We are more connected than ever and therefore more exposed to propaganda than ever. Therefore, now more than ever, we need to know how to spot propaganda so as to defend ourselves from it. Given that this is a subject in which I have a strong interest, I thought some posts which describe the tools of propaganda may be a valuable exercise and will certainly be fun to write. In this series, I’ll write a short description of a propaganda technique in each post with examples from current media/political discourse. And I’ll include an exercise for the reader to complete each time. It’ll be just like being in school. Propaganda School.

But before we get to the specific techniques, we need to define the meaning of propaganda that I will be using.

Propaganda is a dirty word these days. But it was not always so. The etymology of the word relates to propagate and its history begins with the Catholic Church where it was used to denote efforts to spread the message of the Christian faith. The negative connotation entered the culture after the world wars. Governments had engaged in substantial propaganda operations during the wars as a way to win public support for the war effort. This included notoriously manipulative pictures, videos and articles aimed at demonising the enemy. The general horror of the wars and in particular the notion among some soldiers and members of the public that governments had deceived them washed off on the word propaganda and sticks to it right up to this day. Propaganda now means to be misled and misinformed by authorities. It is mostly reserved for particularly egregious examples of misinformation used to justify drastic action while the more mild, everyday types of propaganda have come to be called fake news. Prior to that there was the concept of ‘spin’ which was popularised in the Blair-Clinton eras.

The modern meaning of propaganda thus has distinctly political overtones. Being misinformed by another person would be simply called deception. But propaganda implies an agency or institution in a position of power. Again, this was not always so. George Orwell, using the old meaning of propaganda, once argued that all art was propaganda, not because the artist was in a position of power, but simply because the artist was conveying a message. Just like with the original Church meaning, it was not required that the message be deceptive, only that there was a message. For Orwell, the conscious intentions of the propagandist were not strictly relevant but they are in the modern meaning. For us, propaganda is a message given with, at best, intent to shape a worldview and, at worst, intent to deceive and mislead. If you write a novel which portrays a used car salesman in a flattering light, you aren’t engaged in propaganda. But if you’d been paid by the Australian Used Car Salesman Association to write the book, then you are. Thus, a key meaning of modern propaganda is the intent with which it is delivered.

Orwell’s invocation of art as propaganda is interesting in another way because, for us, propaganda does not belong in the refined air of high literature but in the grubby appeal to the baser elements of human nature. Propaganda should play on the emotions and in particular the negative emotions of fear, anxiety and hatred. A well-reasoned, logical, scientific paper appeals to the rational faculties while a movie reel showing the enemy in an unflattering light appeals to the emotional faculties. You can deceive with the scientific paper (although it would be harder to do so). But it’s the mass media that constitutes the primary medium through which modern propaganda is channeled.

Finally, there is the issue of who is responsible for propaganda: the propagandist or the audience? Implied in the modern usage of the word is the notion of a kind of all-powerful manipulator who makes the public dance like puppets on a string. The reality is that the audience tells the propagandist what they want to hear to a large extent. The propagandist has some wiggle room to shape the audience’s views but is constrained to a large extent by what they will accept. This was always true, but the advent of social media has shown beyond doubt that the public are very willing participants in the game of propaganda. In fact, much of social media discourse consists of the most base forms of propaganda imaginable and is for that reason quite a distasteful sight to see. In theory, the peer-to-peer communication afforded by the internet could have led to an explosion of new ideas and worldviews. In practice, it hasn’t. Arguably the public discourse has become even more polarised and one dimensional in the age of the internet. What we have seen is that the audience itself will regulate the discourse. The propagandist may provide the initial seed but it is the audience that will tend the plant and defend it from attack.

Taking all these things into consideration, the definition of propaganda I will use is: a message spread from an institution or representatives of an institution to the wider public with the intent of shaping their worldview.

This definition is broad and covers both the more extreme and more subtle forms of propaganda. However, in this series of posts, I will be concentrating on the more subtle forms. The reason is because I believe these have not received the attention they deserve. Much has already been written about the more obvious forms of propaganda such as governments misleading the public in order to go to war or the manipulation of the subconscious which forms the backbone of modern advertising. What I haven’t seen is a focus on what you might call the everyday tactics of propaganda used mostly in the media and by politicians. These techniques are so common that most people wouldn’t even notice they are there. That’s what makes them effective. This series of posts will be about those subtle methods. Because they are so subtle, learning how to spot them can also be quite a lot of fun. At least, it is for me. I’m quite aware that a lot of people take the news very seriously these days. I do not and it’s probably worth briefly explaining my position so that the tone of the subsequent posts is clear.

My first assumption is that what is in the media simply isn’t that important. Do you remember the media predicting the GFC before it happened? What about the rise of Trump or Brexit? What about corona? Me neither. Most of the important things that are really going to change your life don’t appear in the media until they have already happened. The media does not predict events, it exists to provide post hoc rationalisations for those events. In doing so, it appeals to human vanity and makes us think we know much more than what we really do.

Secondly, I don’t take the media that seriously because I don’t take my own opinions seriously either. The reason for that is because, for most of my opinions, I have never made any real effort to verify that they are true. Opinions are mostly just things we’ve picked up along the way, often based on information provided by the media, which we otherwise wouldn’t have thought twice about.

“Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.” – Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy.

What was true for Descartes back then is just as true for all of us now. We have all kinds of opinions, most of them fed to us through propaganda, that we simply have never even tried to verify. For that reason, we should view even our own opinions with a deep scepticism let alone the opinions of organisations who have a vested interest in promoting certain ideas. There are a few things in life that I know well enough to know for sure whether something that was written about it in the media is accurate. But most of the time I don’t know enough to be able to judge. In that case, my preference is take everything with a grain of salt. To be highly sceptical rather than highly trusting.

The final reason to take a light-hearted attitude to the media is because most of what is in the media is simply not important. The media feeds primarily on people’s fear of missing out. People like to be informed so they can seem smart. The media also helps to smooth over everyday interactions with others by providing shared topics for conversations. These might be useful functions in the social sphere but, as items of knowledge to be used to as the basis for action, they are of dubious value. The truth is, we don’t really need to know most of that stuff. Take two weeks to completely remove yourself from all news and see if it makes any difference to your life. My guess is that it won’t. Most of us these days consume far too much news and other propaganda. It is bad for our mental health in exactly the same way that consuming too many french fries is bad for physical health. The best way to address that is to cut down on your consumption. The second best way is to turn propaganda consumption into fun. Having a basic understanding of how the media is trying to manipulate you allows you to filter out the stuff you don’t need and just get down to the basic facts. Once you learn the tricks and can spot them, you can triangulate between different sources of propaganda and start to see who is pushing what agenda. That will give you a better understanding of what is really going on because propaganda is really a battle for control of the public opinion. Think of it like sports or music: if you understand the rules, you’ll enjoy it more.

That’s what this series of posts is about. The idea is to make you, the reader, more attentive to the tricks of propaganda. This can not only be a bit of fun but also has the practical advantage of making you more immune to those tricks and better able to form an independent view of the world.

All posts in this series:

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

One of the more interesting things about corona event has been the complete exclusion from the public debate of the economic costs of the measures taken. Of course, politicians always want to exclude discussion of the costs of whatever decision they are making to reduce resistance to those decisions. We rely on the two party system and a functioning media to bring those costs to attention so that the public can make a rounded judgement on an issue. But the costs of the pandemic response have not made it into the mainstream public discourse in any meaningful way.

The absence of a discussion of the economic ramifications is made all the more strange because, for as long as I can remember, the lead news story on any given day was almost always something about the ‘economy’. The rhythms of this news cycle demarcated our lives to a certain extent. The yearly federal budget formed the foundation of these rhythms. It was the kick drum to the snare driven backbeat of the GDP results, the fizzing hi-hat of the monthly jobs data and the inflation statistics while the meetings of the board of the Reserve Bank and the decisions on interest rates made up a nice tom fill with obligatory crash cymbal at the end of the bar. Over the top of all this racket the politicians were the lead singers wailing the high notes of growth, surplus and jobs. Like every AC/DC album since Back in Black, the formula hasn’t changed in decades. But it changed earlier this year as the GDP statistics were replaced by the infection numbers as the centre point around which our lives revolved. Where I live in Melbourne, our premier took on the guise of high priest whose daily press briefings often had a quasi-religious tone as he berated members of the public who had not behaved themselves and prolonged the punishment owing to them. The speculation about the cause of the movement in test positive numbers reminded me of the old speculation about why the stock market went up or down on any given day. That is, an ad hoc explanation for what was essentially a stochastic process.

The politicians have still been running the show, although the members of the backing band have changed from econocrats to health technocrats and the song has changed to a higher tempo and different key. Not the slow, steady, predictable rhythm of stadium rock but a tense, shrill, angsty indie number. Less AC/DC, more Radiohead.

The denial of the economic ramifications from politicians was understandable. What was more interesting and telling was the attitude of the public. This came out in some strange ways, at least in some of the conversations I have had or seen online. For example, I’ve heard a few people say that the solution to the unemployment caused by the corona response is a universal basic income. It’s not clear why that is. Are we unable to create jobs anymore? Do we now live in a world where jobs don’t exist and never will exist again? Once upon a time, our ex-Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said work was our religion. Have we abandoned the faith?

Similarly, if you point out to some people the enormous budget deficits that governments are accruing to pay for the corona response, it’s not uncommon to hear that it doesn’t matter and budget deficits don’t mean anything anyway. That’s certainly news here in Australia where disagreement about the size of any budget deficit was one of the primary differentiating factors between the two main political parties. It’s probably not an understatement to say that elections have been decided because of the size of the budget deficit. But now we no longer care about all that?

This attitude of dismissing what were previously considered important economic metrics was summed up best in words that I actually heard with my own ears earlier in the year: “the economy is not real”. That would be a strange thing to say at the best of times but the statement was made only weeks after the infamous toilet paper shortages where we all experienced the sight of half empty supermarket shelves. You would have thought that an inability to buy food and groceries would have made the realness of the economy clear to people. But apparently not. To be fair, however, the word ‘economy’ was being used by such people in a different sense. In order to understand that different sense we need to take a lightning tour of the development of modern economics as a discipline and the corresponding semantic change it caused in the public discourse.

The word economy is from the Greek oikos – “house” and nemo – “distribute”. It means something like the administration or management of the household. That was the common meaning of the word economy in English right up to the 20^th century. Prior to that, if you wanted to talk about the distribution of wealth at the level of the nation, you were talking about the subject known as political economy and political economy was seen to be a sub-branch of ethics. Thus, Adam Smith’s famous work The Wealth of Nations was in the genre of political economy. In the early 20^th century, economics as the modern academic discipline we all know and love emerged. It was not a branch of ethics or a discussion of household management, but a social science. This ‘science’ eschewed the ethical discussion of political economy in favour of a mathematical approach which was popular in the social sciences of the time and which was driven by the phenomenon known as ‘physics envy’ i.e. the desire to make the study of society as rigorous and respected as physics.

Prior to the 20^th century, the statement ‘the economy is not real’ would have been equivalent to saying that the food on your table is not real or the clothes on your back are not real or your inability to buy toilet paper was not real. But what it means in the modern context is that the ‘science’ of economics is not real. Having done two years of university economics, I have a great deal of sympathy with this idea. In fact, I might go so far as to state that modern economics is completely useless as an area of study. Possibly my favourite example to illustrate that uselessness was a paper I once read on the fairly mundane topic of how consumers choose which petrol station to visit. The author of the study had visited a number of different petrol stations in an area and had noticed that they all had different prices for petrol. He wondered why consumers wouldn’t all go to the one with the lowest price because, even if you had to drive a little bit further, it would work out cheaper to do so. Nevertheless, there were customers at the more expensive stations. Why was this so?

In order to answer this question, he made a long series of arguments referencing other economics papers where theories were expounded about consumer behaviour. On and on it went and eventually he drew some kind of conclusion about the behaviour of consumers in the retail petrol market. But here’s the funny thing: the author could have just asked the motorists themselves. He had already visited the petrol stations to check the prices. Why not just go over and ask a random sample of motorists whether they knew they that the competitor down the road was 5c a litre cheaper? Why not ask them straight out how they decided which petrol station to visit? It would be quite easy to do and he would have got the answer straight from the horse’s mouth. Instead, he simply cited a bunch of other papers none of which contained any empirical studies. It was just a long chain of theories that at no stage bothered to check against reality. The whole thing was a giant exercise in armchair philosophy. This is typical of economics which deals in theory and mathematics without bothering itself much with the real world. (As a side note, within the other social sciences there was a backlash against this kind of thing and a movement towards ‘qualitative studies’ but these have their own set of problems, not the least of which is that they are not reproducible or quantifiable and therefore not really science at all. As far as I know, however, there was no such movement in economics).

If ‘the economy is not real’ means something like ‘economics is not a real science’ then I am in full agreement. However, I don’t think it is just a critique of economics that is meant by the statement ‘the economy is not real’. After all, the same critique could be made of sociology but that wouldn’t lead somebody to say that society was not real (unless they happened to be Margaret Thatcher). I think the rather flippant dismissal of economics we have seen this year is due to the use to which the discipline of economics has been put in the public discourse starting after WW2 but really ramping up in the last few decades. That use can only be described as propaganda.

As I alluded to above, economics has come to fill a central role in public debate. In fact, it’s all we ever hear about. At least, it was all we ever heard about before corona came along. As a (in my opinion) non-science, economics is full of abstractions and layered arguments that only somebody with the capacity for boredom required to sit through four years of university classes on the subject can understand. As such, it is perfectly suited as a tool to befuddle the public with airy abstractions, meaningless metrics and mysterious models all of which help divert attention from the underlying political issues. That is why politicians love economics. It’s an ideal tool of distraction.

At bottom, politics is a system for deciding how to distribute wealth. In a democracy, you vote for politicians who are going to represent your interests, chief among which are your economic interests. This used to be very clear and obvious. The Labor Party existed to represent the economic interests of labour, the Liberal Party to represent capital and the National Party to represent rural interests. Public debate explicitly focused on how decisions affected the economic interests of each of these groups. That changed around the time of the 80s when the Labor Party (and the equivalent parties in other western nations) essentially abandoned its constituency and bought into the neo-liberal agenda. That’s when globalisation kicked off for real and it’s also when economics as a discipline really started to dominate the public discourse and the ‘experts’ and technocrats came to dominate our lives. Appealing to expertise has clear advantages for politicians because it removes the political aspect to any issue. It’s not me as the politician making a decision to screw over a certain part of the population, it’s the science. Because it’s objective and it’s scientific, there’s no real alternative. This has given much of modern political discourse a sense of inevitability. There’s no point in arguing because the government can just appeal to the experts and as a layman you don’t have a leg to stand on. This sense of inevitability was captured perfectly by former Australian Prime Minster, Paul Keating’s, famous phrase ‘the recession we had to have’ or Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’. Gone are the debates of political economy and ethics. Gone even are the discussions of personal interest.

The abstractions used by economists work perfectly as tools of propaganda precisely because they are hard to grasp. If they meant something concrete, it would make it easier for the average person to understand and therefore to object. For this reason, economics was a favourite theme of the great Australia/New Zealand comedy duo Clarke and Dawe who mercilessly targeted experts as they appeared in the public discourse. One of my favourite examples of their work is this video where John Clarke plays an expert who is asked to explain the Australian energy market. It’s specifically relevant to the theme of this post because it juxtaposes the nonsense of the experts against the everyday reality of people having to pay more money for electricity (which is part of the real economics of household management). What the average citizen wants to know is why their electricity bills are going up. What they get is a bunch of abstract drivel which hides that fact that vested interests behind the scenes have stitched up the situation to their advantage.

So, perhaps the statement ‘the economy does not exist’ is really the rejection of the propaganda of economics. This makes a great deal of sense. It’s the public finally saying that they have had enough of the nonsense they have been fed for decades. This would tie in with the palpable but strange sense of relief felt by many people as corona kicked off. I’ve had the very strong impression that a number of people have supported the corona measures precisely because they represent a break with the past. The government finally did something. In this way, the rejection of economics might seem like a step in the right direction. Are we finally throwing off the shackles of expertise and returning to a proper political discussion based on interests and ethics where the interests of the public can be adequately represented in the discourse?

Sadly, not. All that has really happened this year is that one form of propaganda got replaced with another. The GDP statistics were swapped out for the infection statistics. The numbers are different but the game is the same. The politicians still appeal to ‘science’ to justify their decisions only now the science is not economics but epidemiology. The Queensland premier, in particular, has been fond of pointing out that all the difficult choices are really made by her chief medical officer and are therefore not even a matter of politics. Meanwhile, here in Victoria, our premier claims that all his decisions are based on ‘science’ and anybody who disagrees with him is, by definition, not being scientific. Again, the layman is left powerless in the face of expertise. Again, the sound of the church bells of ‘science’ ring loud and call the faithful to prayer.

“Do you hear that, Mr Anderson?”

Or, as the lyric from one of my favourite Who songs goes: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The irony of it all is that, just like the creator of GDP said that it should never be used as a measurement of economic performance, so too the inventor of the PCR said it should not be used as a diagnostic tool of viral disease. Logically this should be a problem. But when it comes to propaganda, meaningless numbers are a feature not a bug. If the numbers meant something, they could be argued against.

What the corona event represents is a ramping up of the propaganda to new heights. Coupled with the authoritarian turn in politics it presents a rather scary vision for the future. Will the old economics ever return as the propaganda tool of choice? Will we be permanently stuck with the new propaganda of corona statistics? It’s hard to say. A lot will depend on what happens with the real world that sits beneath the noise and which our public discourse seems to have less and less to do with.

None of that is much in the control of any of us. But there is one thing that is in our control and that is to rediscover the true meaning of economics as household management and to also rediscover political economy as a discipline of real economics founded in ethics. In other words, we can ask in what ways can we ensure a supply of goods to our own households (or produce them ourselves) and we can determine what our real economic interests are and whether there are any politicians who actually represent those interests rather than just spout propaganda. The real economy seems set for a period of rapid change. It would be wise for individuals to hedge their households against the risks of that change because no amount of propaganda is going to put food in the pantry.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing

The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle

The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death

The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic