REPOST: A strange, subterranean battle... by A K Haart

Reposted from 5 April 2015 and more relevant than ever...

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Every now and them something bright, clean and optimistic seems to show itself through the shifting fogs of repressive nonsense. Sometimes the ugly honking of professional liars dies down. For a while real life takes over. As it should of course.

It has become so easy to ignore the liars and find things out for ourselves. Or at least identify those many areas of uncertainty which the liars claim to be certain. Isn’t it easy to find worthwhile comment on virtually any issue? Isn’t it noticeable how rarely many of us go to the mainstream media for worthwhile comment?

So what does it all mean?

I don’t know.

Then what is the point of this post?

Simple – you can go elsewhere can’t you? Click. I am not a guru and neither are you. We don’t need them do we - you and I?

That’s the point – we are breeding vast numbers of savvy people, far more than we ever had before. Folk who don’t always have the facts and the arguments at their fingertips, but in one sense they know far more than most people knew only twenty years ago. Not only that, but they know how to flesh out anything of interest with a click or two.

This quiet upheaval seems to have upset the old paternalistic way of doing things, the assumptions about managing people, about politics, democracy, who tells and who listens. Who tells these days? Who listens?

Old style class rule with its unidirectional media cannot deal with it. Millions of savvy people are now collectively smarter than the elites because they are connected, interested, experienced and capable. The elites don’t have time to be interested or capable. They only have time to suck the teat of their sponsors. They think savvy can be dealt with by opinion surveys.

They muddle through by listening to a host of special advisers who do have the time to become passably savvy, but there are only a few of them while there are vast numbers of savvy folk out there – a host of virtual polymaths unrestricted by national boundaries.

Out there on the web are millions of years of personal experience. Think about that for a moment – millions of years of personal experience all available for sharing.

The old ways are creaking and the elites and their sponsors are furiously attempting to wind back the clock with a plethora of prohibitions, narratives, entertainments and controlling policies. Anything to keep the virtual polymaths at bay. It’s a strange, subterranean battle.