Building Consensus!

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Truth is Consensus.

Oct 04, 2024

"I think our reverence for the truth, might become, might have become—a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done."¹
— Katherine Maher, CEO of National Public Radio

Francisco Goya, "The Third of May," Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Image has been altered.

Katherine Maher sounds like someone enamored with the construction of her own sentence instead of thinking about what it means. It does have a nice sound and cadence to it and that little pause—at just the right moment—while everyone waits for the momentous conclusion, makes her sound as if she’s carefully thought about it (watch it).

It’s like a Jackson Pollock painting: people know they’re “supposed” to like it, but there’s still that nagging feeling of “That just doesn’t look that impressive, I bet I could do that.” Still, the consensus is people are supposed to like it, just like they’re supposed to give up their reverence for the truth. Why worry about truth when you can build consensus?

el gato malo wrote an excellent piece on Little Johnny Kerry lamenting how hard it is to govern these days with all the “misinformation” being espoused on alternative sources of media. Kerry whined that it makes it really hard to build consensus “around any issue.” Apparently, building consensus is necessary to govern people, especially before you kill them.

Back before Johnny’s little tirade you may remember there were a lot of bytes wasted trying to get us all to buy into the idea that “scientific consensus” is a good idea. We were told it existed in relation to Covid and all those safe and effective mRNA experimental jabs that are still killing people. The jabs had googles and googles of scientific consensus, hence doctors were a threat to society if they hadn’t yet heard there was no need for them to do their own research on it, because all the other doctors in the entire, freaking universe agreed the shots would save grandmas all across the globe, ~~save billions of people~~ make billions of dollars and cure any aspirations people had to live in a free country. Like magic there was scientific consensus in the whole world. Imagine that!

My goal in this post is to make an argument that consensus is not only not feasible but not desirable.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Sir, but you can’t write about this until you have consensus.”

“What?”

“Respectfully, Sir, you need consensus before you can write about this.”

“But I’m trying to persuade people that we don’t need consensus.”

“I understand, but until you have consensus on not needing consensus, you can’t write about not needing consensus without consensus.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m sorry, Sir. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them.”

“Well, who the hell makes up the rules?”

“Sorry, Sir, but I don’t know.”

“I’d like to know who makes these rules. That’s important.”

“I don’t have names, Sir, but I’m sure they’re experts in their fields. They wouldn’t be making the rules if they were not.”

“Since I don’t think we need consensus, the people who think we do need consensus, don’t have consensus either.”

“That’s a good point, Sir, but it is important to remember that consensus isn’t based on logic or truth, constructs from the old paradigm implemented by white males, which are now proven to be detrimental to governing the masses. The consensus is that neither logic or truth can be used effectively to determine consensus.”

“So how was that consensus determined?”

“That’s not an important question, Sir, because we have no answer to that question and unanswerable questions of this nature only block effective governing. The more important question is how can the political class govern their people without interference from the people they govern? Once the governed agree not to question those doing the governing, agree to dispense with reverence for the truth, we’ll have the kind of consensus we need to go boldly forth where no people have ever gone before—we can get some really important things done! Sorry, Sir, I got a little worked up there. It’s just so exciting!”

“Who are you?”

“I’m not really sure, Sir. I don’t even know how I got into this post. I suspect maybe I don’t exist.”

“Now we have some consensus.”

The idea that a group of people can be the sole arbiters of “truth” is irrational. Individual biases always creep in, and the greater the influence of such a group, the more ingrained and dogmatic those biases will become, until the system is corrupted to the core. One could argue that dogmatic faith in nonexistent scientific consensuses is the reason for why we are where we are today.
— Dr. Joseph Mercola, Scientism, Not Science, Rules the Roost