Two important rhetorical coding schemes under liberalism:
- ‘prediction‘ for (planning) proposal
- ‘expert’ for official dogma
Both rely on and promulgate an individualistic social ontology that systematically conceals the functioning of government.
- ‘prediction‘ for (planning) proposal
- ‘expert’ for official dogma
Both rely on and promulgate an individualistic social ontology that systematically conceals the functioning of government.
The ‘market economy’ and elections exemplify the use of predictions for planning (self-fulfilling prophecies). The economy is covertly directed through economic predictions and the boundaries of election discourse are covertly set by predictions of voter preferences and response.
The media and policy-making exemplify the use of ‘expert’ discourse to obscure official dogma. The political, economic, psychological, and sociological ‘expertise’ that dictates how the media covers events and how policy gets made use credentialism to enforce conformity.
Looking at liberal democratic institutions from a holistic perspective we can see that the media, taken as a whole, forms a state media. That the economy, taken as a whole, forms a state-planned economy. That electoral democracy, taken as a whole, amounts to a propaganda tool.
Essential to this is the use of an individualistic ontology to code planning as prediction and official dogma as expertise. It’s individualistic ontology that makes these ideas appear coherent. We have to ‘predict‘ social outcomes because they‘re the sum of individual actions.
Official dogma can be coded as ’expertise’ because, supposedly, individual experts have access to methodologies that let them produce ‘objective’ results. Here natural science is extended to cover the social realm, but in reality that extension is only rhetorical (concealment).
The conception of science that we have in the liberal world is not that created by natural scientists themselves, but that created by those who tried to extend science to the psychological and sociological. However, this project only produced a way to conceal authority.
Defining science subjectively as the avoidance of bias and influence, opens the way to the rhetorical presentation of official doctrines as ‘independently’ developed ‘expert discourse’ that (selectively) rejects (certain) biases and influences (to arrive at official discourse).
