We live in the age of the Big Scam. Bankers wheel and deal and go broke. They come to the public, not clothed in the penitence of sackcloth and ashes but as suicide bombers claiming they're armed with financial H-bombs that will leave us begging bread unless we accede to their demands.
And we bought it.
We live in the age of the Little Scam. Someone comes on to a website and claims to be "X" or "Y" or "Z" to buttress their arguments. We like their arguments because they agree with our own, and we find ourselves granting the additional authenticity they claim.
More subtly, we listen to each other's advocacy online while having little or no basis upon which to gauge how well the advocate and what she/he advocates correlate--in other words, the advocate's integrity. A fierce proponent of "free speech" on the site could be demanding that his partner "stifle it" at home. One who decries those who lord it over others at the macro level of our society could be a ruthless authoritarian in his personal dealings.
Why have we become such big suckers for the Big and Little Scam?
We live in the Age of Liars. To me, that is quite remarkable. I grew up on a farm outside a small town where it was impossible to be a Liar and get away with it for long. When you lied or even made a promise that you didn't keep, people other than your victim soon learned about it.
What has changed from my boyhood? Why is it now so easy and advantageous to lie?
Human beings once dealt face-to-face exclusively. We have extraordinary, genetically built-in skills that surpass any intelligence agency's truth-telling methods. Is the man across the desk telling me the truth about the bottom price on this car? Is this woman standing two feet away telling me the truth about the quality of the plumbing in this house?
Face-to-face communication has deteriorated in our society to a point that we bare our souls in a DailyKos diary and open our hearts to words posted on an Internet page. That's especially true for politics where the painful truths that haunt our society make it very difficult to discuss issues openly in the manner of real democrats like the Athenians.
But where is the truth? We have no way of knowing nor should we. A union-busting lawyer is not barred from being a Kossack. She might even share some "progressive" issues because she's a she or gay or black. But when she carefully suggests that EFCA just wouldn't work in a global economy, how seriously should we take her views?
There's life, and there's the Internet. The Internet is quite useful for disseminating information that the MSM would rather suppress. It's a useful tool for spreading ideas that are suppressed in our society. The Internet tubes certainly lend themselves to networking beyond the usual geographical bounds.
But you can't live on the Internet. The people you interact with here are not really your friends or allies or enemies. You can't know who the hell they are.
So live real life. Create organizations of real flesh-and-blood people, not usernames. Unite with and help people whom you can see and smell the way our ancestors did in the caves.
Otherwise, you're bound to be a persistent victim in the Age of Liars.
As Stevie Wonder put it:
He's a man
With a plan
Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand
He's Misstra Know-It-All
Take my word
Please beware
Of a man that just don't give a care