https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/this-dystopia-depends-on-hiding-inconvenient
Caitlin Johnstone
Nov 29, 2024

This civilization is built upon the practice of continuously hiding inconvenient truths out of sight and out of mind. An entire empire held together by compartmentalization and avoidance.

Inconvenient truths are hidden from us in many different ways. They are hidden from our minds using propaganda, indoctrination, censorship, algorithm manipulation, and other forms of narrative control used to manipulate the ways we think about our world.

Inconvenient truths are also hidden from our physical eyes and ears by the manipulation of material reality. We’re choking the developing world with plastics as we ship the mountains of garbage the west produces off to poorer countries, for example. If nations had to keep the waste they produce and consume within their own borders, western civilization would either force its corporations to stop offloading their costs of industry onto the environment or find itself buried in garbage. We ship our trash away, out of sight and out of mind, to hide the contradictions and abuses that are built into our capitalist society so we can pretend everything’s going fine.

Inconvenient truths are being hidden when laws are passed to force the homeless to relocate away from rich neighborhoods and other places where they are not wanted, or force them all into “tent cities” as Donald Trump is saying he wants to do. There are never any plans to give these people homes or solve the underlying problems which create poverty and homelessness; there are only ever plans to hide the symptoms of the injustices and abuses that are woven into the fabric of the civilization we live in.

Inconvenient truths are being hidden when we condemn the past use of slavery in our own countries while outsourcing immense amounts of wage slavery to the global south, extracting labor and resources from impoverished nations at extortionate and increasingly unfair rates. The suffering, impoverishment, relentless toil and terrible working conditions of these foreign workers are kept out of sight and out of mind while we gorge ourselves on cheap goods and toss our garbage back in their faces.

Inconvenient truths are being hidden by how much more comfortable our rulers are with using violent force in faraway nations compared to here at home. In the western world you might have to worry about being assaulted by a police officer or a SWAT team smashing in your door and killing your dog if you are suspected of selling drugs, but you don’t have to worry about your home being bombed or your children being executed by military snipers while playing in the streets. Because foreign nations are out of sight and out of mind, the managers of the western empire think nothing of raining fire down upon them to promote their strategic interests.

We walk around in this perverse dystopia and laugh and joke and act like everything is fine, but everything is not fine. People are suffering and dying at an unimaginable scale because of the systems which allow us to live this way, and if it weren’t for the deceitful way this is always being hidden out of sight and out of mind, we would see this first hand right in front of us. And we would be forced to own it.

Western civilization is like a castle on a mountain, and the mountain is made out of human corpses and weeping mothers and starving children, and everyone in the castle pretends that the mountain is not there. It forms the very foundation of everything our society is, but we try not to think about it too hard. It’s not just the propagandists who lie to us. We also lie to ourselves.

And it’s always been this way. The well-to-do have always hidden themselves away from the suffering of their subjects. Palaces throughout the ages have been islands of paradise amid oceans of human suffering caused by the monarchs who lived in them. Wealthy neighborhoods are always segregated apart from the lives of the poor whose backs they are built upon.

That’s the entire western world right now. That’s what we are. That’s what we’re doing. This is a civilization made of deceitful thoughts, deceitful words, and deceitful deeds. Everything about it is fraudulent.

The truth can’t stay hidden forever, though. There’s only so long we can keep this up. Someday we’re not going to be able to keep flailing around looking every direction except at reality, and truth will make itself heard.