Is the Truth Un-American?

In Peter C. Baker’s review of a book on George Orwell - a collection of twenty essay’s focusing on the currency and relevance of Orwell’s “brand of vigilant skepticism about language, politics and the media” - Baker discusses one essay within entitled Our Own Thought Police. [The book itself is entitled What Orwell Didn’t Know.]

This essay appears to call into question, the presumption that people actually want to know the truth. I haven’t shared that presumption in some time. That is why, on more than one occasion, I’ve quoted or paraphrased an old German philosopher-madman screaming at the top of his lungs: What in us really wants truth rather than lies or ignorance?, only to show us truths we don’t really care to know. So I’m not much troubled nor surprised by the fact that people don’t really want the truth and worse might become hostile at its utterance.

Human beings. Curious animals.

So, anyway, in this essay one learns that when you actually inform Joe and Jane American of the heinous actions of their soldiers, for example, they not only do not want to hear but may get angry. One consequence of this will-to-ignorance is that the media intentionally under-report such truths.

When such stories make the news, people get either pissed off or bored, then change the channel or turn the page — or call the station in a huff, demanding that this anti-Americanism be taken off the air. “The public,” Massing writes, “has become its own collective Ministry of Truth.”

Isn’t that a beautiful sentence! The American public has becomes its own collective Ministry of Truth! Who needs good old fashioned German fascism stomping a boot on your throat when the public in general is all too happy to lap up deception and scream down the truth!