How to Avoid a Phd (Penalty for Hardworking Dummies): Wishing I Were an Autodidact by Tamara I. Hammond

Author:Tamara I. Hammond
Format: epub

Chapter Eight

The Dissident Indie Media: If They Can

See Through Propaganda, We Can Too

Once safely captured, we are trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest.

~Matt Taibbi

B eing a dissident is not easy. Even in a political system where the consequences are mild, such as not being hirable in well-paying jobs, or constantly being discredited in your profession, these reasons are more than enough to deter you from being one. The extreme version of retaliation for non-conforming consists of life-threatening consequences such as being arrested, imprisoned, or murdered. This simple calculation explains why there are so few dissidents among both regular people and the professional class in academia, media, and recently, medical research. As Chomsky reiterated in different speeches and writings, the Western political systems reward obedience and punish any deviation from the strict line of conduct designed by the elites. The conditioning starts in kindergarten and continues through school, college, and graduate programs. It is universal and no one is exempt from it. Yong children, and later young people learn throughout their education what is acceptable to say, do, or believe. The ones who deviate from the conventional wisdom are ostracized socially, reprimanded through the grading system and continuously filtered out from privileges, prestigious schools, and lucrative careers. There are plenty financial incentives such as scholarships, grants, and fellowships for going in the right direction by choosing the right academic topics, the right theses, and the right doctrines. Students learn by experience to avoid controversial subjects and to tow the right ideological line. Throughout their experience, students often subconsciously make choices because of some hardship they have gone through, or witnessed their classmates being flaked for the wrong choices they made intellectually or professionally. One of the consequences is self-censorship, a practice widely used in western societies. George Orwell explains this phenomenon in his 1945 unpublished preface to the Animal Farm, titled “Freedom of the Press:”

This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the Ministry of Information or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.³⁴⁰

This practice, described so well by Orwell back in the 1940s is not only well and alive in the 21st century; it is even more refined, sophisticated, and effectively obscured by the same lacking courage intellectuals, mentioned earlier. The fact that this 70-year-old preface

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