To counter this idea, I suggested that his generation had been lied to by the ruling class to an exceptional degree, in an especially loathsome way. He countered with a statement whose truth I cannot deny:
The Establishment has lied to every generation since the beginning of time.He was right of course. This world works in such a way that the ones on top tend to be the ones who will do and say anything to get and stay on top. This has been so since the first large cities rose up on the plains of Mesopotamia. This is a large part of the reason that Localism is the best worst option for human government. Centralized power heaped up in one place attracts the worst sort of human personality. Even for us "normals", whatever flaw in character we might have will be tested by power, and given enough power over enough time all of us will fail that test. That's why the Founding Fathers sought to create a system of Checks and Balances. These have since been, in practical terms, cast aside via means devious and cunning by persons of the same sort which I have described above.
Over one hundred years ago the Iron Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck said “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” History has judged him as a ruthless and cynical man, and he was. He is a good example of the sort who rise to the top by cunning and ruthlessness. But compared to the neocons who have seized control of U.S. foreign policy he was practically a pacifist! He was certainly more honest. So my young friend was quite correct in his main point.
Even so, at the risk of saying one of those things that smart people are not supposed to say, "this time it's different." Yes grasping and ruthless personalities have forced their way to the top since time immemorial. That hasn't changed. But some things have changed, and changed in a way which makes the size and power of the establishment's lie-telling machine exponentially more powerful.
There was no mass media on the plains of Mesopotamia. Nor was there any besides print newspapers in Bismarck's day. The King of Babylon might have had a town-crier, but the ratio of information and attention from centralized sources vs. individual people just talking to one another was very low. The establishment just didn't have the resources to capture a large slice of people's total attention. Now a huge proportion of every word we hear and read comes directly or indirectly from establishment sources. I guess you have all seen the video of one "local" news anchor after another parroting the exact same words. I have often said that any society with banks which are "too big to fail" will also have an establishment media which is "too connected to the system to tell you the truth". The Establishment Media does not exist to inform the public. It exists to protect the establishment.
One may argue that the same technology which has brought us mass media has now given us social media where we can talk to one another more, thus restoring balance. This is true, if it is left alone. But we see slowly and by degrees, things are not being left alone. Disfavored opinions are increasingly being stifled on the biggest social media platforms. They are not showing up in the top search results of the most popular search engines. A vast swarm of fake accounts can be conjured up to manufacture support for an opinion which wasn't popular at the start. Global corporations are working together with government to determine which opinions should be amplified, and which should be suppressed. People are free to express system-approved opinions which are either no consequence to or echo the establishment line. This preserves the illusion of a free market of ideas, but not the substance. I think if they had not found ways to control and shape large social media platforms, they would have pulled the plug on them.
There is also the circumstance of the size of government. In days of Yore, a King may hand out goodies to his favored courtiers, but the idea of an expansive state involved in every detail of one's life was an alien concept. A million-dollar government only has the resources to tell you a million dollars worth of lies. A trillion-dollar government like the one we have now has the resources to tell you a trillion dollars worth of lies. A government meddling in ten aspects of your existence is in position to tell you lies about ten aspects of your existence. A government involved in every aspect of your life is in position to put you in a sort of "matrix".
It is true that in days of Yore the state would co-opt religion and this is not explicitly done in the west anymore. That may be one reason why the state puts such effort into marginalizing religion- except for that which is most compliant to its ends. The new authority figures now do not wear the smock of a Priest but the lab coat of a scientist. Notice that most research today is also funded by the state. Thus our new icons of truth, though they may seem separate from the government when they echo messages convenient to the state, are largely just another arm of government. Scientists are in danger of becoming the new high priests of the state. At least prophets often challenged its excesses.
The conclusion for me is that, yes this time it is different. It is different in both the quality and quantity of information coming from (directly or indirectly) official sources verses our power as individuals to counter official sources with our various independently-derived narratives. Those who claw their way into power might not be any more terrible than they have always been, but the tools they have at their disposal are. People are increasingly accepting official narratives as their own without even realizing that their views were not closely examined or truly arrived at via independent thought. They were absorbed through mental osmosis from a system which can saturate mis-information into the population at a scale never before possible. In such a system, dissent will be increasingly marginalized, even though it is the root of all human progress.
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