The Final Lie
There is something so symbolic about Tucker Carlson’s final send-off to his Fox News audience of some 4.1 million loyal sycophants. He ends by saying something stupid about how he will be telling them about how they are being forced to eat bugs and then quickly reminds them that he promises to see them all on Monday. That was last Friday and, of course, as we all know now, Monday morning he was unceremoniously terminated by Fox News. I am writing this on Tuesday morning before I have heard too much more that some investigative reporter has sleuthed about exactly what went on inside Fox News that ended Tucker Carlson’s seven year run as the poster child for all the things that a portion of our country always seem to want to fear and hate. The irony that his last few moments of on-air time were spent on something as inane and conspiracy theory oriented as bug eating is only eclipsed by this final promise to his audience that he would be back on Monday, finishing, as it turned out, with just one last lie to make his audience remember why they loved watching him so much.
What is it about that portion of the population that is so dissatisfied with their lives and their very existence that they feel better by glowering at Tucker Carlson’s many-faceted glower rather than getting out there and making things better for themselves and their world? What did hatred and fear ever beget other than more hatred and fear? The fact that this portion of the population doesn’t recognize this aspect of their obsession is almost impossible to understand for anyone with even a smidge of serotonin in their brain. And yet, this is really nothing new. I would suggest that it is merely more amplified now due to social media than it ever has been before. When the first curmudgeon cave man walked the earth, his venom could only spread as far as his voice and his feet could carry. Then we learned how to sail around the world. We tend to think of the Vikings as nasty guys, but having done my Baltics tour, I would suggest that the Vikings were pretty good at enjoying life as they rampaged through it. By the time the great global explorers of Western Europe set forth on their ships, they were joined by either deep-seated religiosity or by actual clergy members who carried with them an abundance of hate and fear of the real world they knew, not to mention the unknown world to which they were headed. That made for a quantum leap forward in the spreading of fear and hatred into indigenous populations, perhaps for good reason, based on all the deadly germs these intrepid explorers carried with them as well.
The discovery of an entire two new continents in the New World did wonders for spreading hatred and fear in the form of excess greed and lust. Enough is rarely enough when there is more discovered that can be obtained by the simple act of deploying your fear and hate in the direction of peoples that can’t speak your language and don’t pray to your God and thus do not enter your moral sphere of concern. Declaring hate and fear in the direction of things and people that exist outside the artificial boundaries we set up around ourselves, replete with walls that grow taller and taller, is a great way to turn lies into norms and norms into truths.
But the thing about a bigger and bigger world with more and more walls to encourage fear and hatred is that you need to communicate with your distant outposts, don’t you? That means you need a broadcast medium that goes beyond your vocal chords. With the invention of the radio, the telegraph, the telephone, television, the internet, social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and now, Zoom, we have finally arrived at that great walled city in the sky. We call it The Cloud for now and it has started out as all of these things do as the great enabler. Remember when the thermos was the greatest invention in the world? It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold and all without knowing which is which? Well, such naïveté launched The Cloud until we began to realize that not everyone in The Cloud with us was like us or thought like us. So hate and fear were hiding in the corner all along and it was high time we did something about it. Let’s burn some books. Let’s close some libraries. Let’s ban some people from social media. No wait, let’s just ban the social media platforms we think might be filled with things that we don’t like and that tells our feared and hated enemies things about us that we don’t want them to know. Wasn’t that what Marshall McLuhane meant when he said it’s the medium not the message? After all, do we want our privacy invaded like letting people know what temperature we like our bedroom at during the night and what Netflix shows we watch the most. How dare those hated and feared enemies of ours do that to us. Let’s just kill them all and be done with it, right?
But wait…not so fast. If we ban this stuff, aren’t we becoming just like our feared and hated enemies that are feared and hated because they ban stuff like that from their own people? If we want to kill them all, doesn’t that just make them all want to hate and fear us and then want to kill us all? This is a thornier problem than we realized.
The contradictions are thick enough to cut with a machete (I’m not sure a knife is big enough for the task). I actually recently bought a machete, something I have wanted to do since I was a child in the tropics of Costa Rica. I’m probably less at risk for life and limb if I use it to hack away at cultural contradictions rather than local vegetation, so I will try and unpack the ones that bother me the most:
1. Capitalism v. Socialism – Our misuse of isms is astounding. This issue goes so far beyond private versus public ownership. The big question isn’t whether Democrats are pushing Socialism on America, as Republicans like to say to raise voters’ hackles, but whether Capitalism can truly exist and flourish in any system other than a true democracy. That should be the real conversation in the country and what it takes to have a true democracy.
2. Individual Liberty v. Common Good – This is another way to capture the collectivist debate, but it is distinctly American since nowhere other than perhaps Australia, is the population so wed to the idealism of the individual as we are in America. Can these two coexist, or perhaps more importantly, can one prosper without the other?
3. Are Free Markets a reality and a benefit or a myth and a scourge.? The issue distills down as to whether government regulation is a necessity in civilized life and whether it can be curtailed or must grow exponentially as the complexity and scale of the world increases. Ask yourself if you want AI making your life choices for you. If not, you better re-engage on the regulation issue.
4. What are the limits of free speech? I can take this one in ten different directions and chances are you’ve heard them all. The most explosive current issues in this realm revolve around social media and just how much freedom we can insist on without the level of deceit and confusion rising to dysfunctional levels. Does free speech allow me to broadcast lies and misinformation and are we left with only a wary listener to adjudicate what to believe or not? I’m not sure that is a world that is conducive to overall prosperity.
5. Is civil society a worthwhile higher order of enlightenment and does it serve the public good? Undoubtedly that will hinge on our agreed definition of “civil” and might quickly be translated in Florida to “woke”.
These battlegrounds of our modern cultural landscape are where we most fight among ourselves these days. It’s not about the economy, stupid. It not about abortion or progressive taxation. Those are just the interim lies we tell ourselves. It’s really all about the final lie, which is that we must do this to save our Republic, even though most of us have no idea what that means.