That might be the question of our age: How much do the decision-makers understand?
Talking from personal experience: not much. I think a lot of it does come down to idealism and faulty models. There will be people at the very top who understand materialism (and class). But how far up do you need to go to get to the top? And lower down? They don’t teach any kind of dialectical materialism in universities for the most part. Almost everything taught must be compatible with liberalism.
It’s like accountants, etc. They can be as highly educated, accomplished, and as high up as you like. But for the most part, they still get it wrong. They will scream till they’re blue in the face that the company can’t afford a pay rise because of XYZ common-sense-reasons. Then the workers will strike, suddenly the money for the pay rise appears. And these accountants will just blank out – forever – the fact that they were 100% sure and yet 100% wrong; because money doesn’t work like they think it does. The reality will not deter them at all from being 100% confident and wrong next time. They’re convinced of premises that don’t match the material world and simply living through a different truth is insufficient to shake those premises.
Journalism like this is certainly propaganda. The truth is in there, but you have to dig for it and the narrative leaves the reader with the opposite impression of what is happening. I imagine the top military brass knows the reality a little more but their worldview won’t let them see it in many cases. Like the accountants, I would bet that there are generals whose liberalism simply won’t let them see the truth. No new empirical data will change the way that they fundamentally conceive of the world.
Partly, for the e.g. the general and the accountant, they won’t be able to see the truth because their material conditions won’t allow for it. If those who ‘run’ the military were to let themselves see how irresponsible it is to commodify the military, they would never agree to take their troops to war. All that many of these individuals will remember after every conflict is that they won their skirmishes, therefore the overall narrative of US superiority and exceptionalism remains true; even if the US ‘loses’ one war after another for decades.
(The US doesn’t really ‘lose’ any war even when it ‘loses’ because the point is rarely to win but to participate to make profit and destroy something that will need to be rebuilt by US imperialists.)
It’s no surprise that China, insisting on applying materialist dialectics to every problem and every solution, as did the USSR before it (for a time 😔), is racing ahead in every field. That can happen when you accept reality for what it is. Do the ‘higher ups’ believe the bullshit? That might be why the world is in the mess that it’s in.
I guess the thing that worries me the most about this idea is that if the top brass do believe their own nonsense, they might start a war with China because they’ve bought into all the anti-China propaganda they’ve made up. And when they fight that war, and don’t get the instant victory they thought they would, I’m terrified of what they might do to make sure that even if they can’t “win” they will at least make sure China “loses.”
That might be the question of our age: How much do the decision-makers understand?
Talking from personal experience: not much. I think a lot of it does come down to idealism and faulty models. There will be people at the very top who understand materialism (and class). But how far up do you need to go to get to the top? And lower down? They don’t teach any kind of dialectical materialism in universities for the most part. Almost everything taught must be compatible with liberalism.
It’s like accountants, etc. They can be as highly educated, accomplished, and as high up as you like. But for the most part, they still get it wrong. They will scream till they’re blue in the face that the company can’t afford a pay rise because of XYZ common-sense-reasons. Then the workers will strike, suddenly the money for the pay rise appears. And these accountants will just blank out – forever – the fact that they were 100% sure and yet 100% wrong; because money doesn’t work like they think it does. The reality will not deter them at all from being 100% confident and wrong next time. They’re convinced of premises that don’t match the material world and simply living through a different truth is insufficient to shake those premises.
Journalism like this is certainly propaganda. The truth is in there, but you have to dig for it and the narrative leaves the reader with the opposite impression of what is happening. I imagine the top military brass knows the reality a little more but their worldview won’t let them see it in many cases. Like the accountants, I would bet that there are generals whose liberalism simply won’t let them see the truth. No new empirical data will change the way that they fundamentally conceive of the world.
Partly, for the e.g. the general and the accountant, they won’t be able to see the truth because their material conditions won’t allow for it. If those who ‘run’ the military were to let themselves see how irresponsible it is to commodify the military, they would never agree to take their troops to war. All that many of these individuals will remember after every conflict is that they won their skirmishes, therefore the overall narrative of US superiority and exceptionalism remains true; even if the US ‘loses’ one war after another for decades.
(The US doesn’t really ‘lose’ any war even when it ‘loses’ because the point is rarely to win but to participate to make profit and destroy something that will need to be rebuilt by US imperialists.)
It’s no surprise that China, insisting on applying materialist dialectics to every problem and every solution, as did the USSR before it (for a time 😔), is racing ahead in every field. That can happen when you accept reality for what it is. Do the ‘higher ups’ believe the bullshit? That might be why the world is in the mess that it’s in.
I guess the thing that worries me the most about this idea is that if the top brass do believe their own nonsense, they might start a war with China because they’ve bought into all the anti-China propaganda they’ve made up. And when they fight that war, and don’t get the instant victory they thought they would, I’m terrified of what they might do to make sure that even if they can’t “win” they will at least make sure China “loses.”