A few years ago, I was watching CNN for some reason or another when I saw something so ironic it would make the cast of Portlandia look like a platoon of Green Berets: Eliot Spitzer, a disgraced New York politician famously shamed by the mainstream media for his involvement in a prostitution scandal, and less famous for his role inside mainstream media as co-host of a CNN talk show, was acting as an arbiter of social justice by leading a debate discussing whether or not the French ban on wearing the Muslim niqab was right or wrong.
While the debate itself is interesting, and it brings up valid points about freedom and the full extent of the First Amendment to protect religious values, this is not going to be discussed in this article. What will be discussed is how the niqab debate, and others like it, demonstrates how the mainstream media protects certain values, and thereby prevents true change in values from occurring. I will also discuss what the manosphere can do about it.
Maintaining Assumed Values Protects Power
The media provides a 24/7 newstream of stories covering controversial “issues” like gay rights, terrorism, gun control, feminism, etc. These stories are complemented with debates where several preselected viewpoints are raised and the relative merits or failures of each are revealed through discussion. This may make the average viewer feel fine and good because the impression given by the debate is one of fairness: all possible and reasonable viewpoints have been presented, and people can make an “informed” decision as to what argument is best using their own judgment, and therefore vote accordingly.
The problem with this is of course that the debates are completely manufactured to cause the audience to accept certain values. The debate is, for all intents and purposes, a ruse to make people believe they have free choice in deciding who is right or wrong on some superficial level, while the real values below the surface are completely undisturbed by public opinion.
How the Process Works
For example, assumed values were needed for the niqab debate to occur: both debaters were women, and professionals, so viewers must accept professional women as being intrinsic value of society; values like the right of women to work are the axioms society is assumedly based on.
It is certain that capitalists benefit from women working, as it decreases the value of labor. Capitalists therefore want people to accept the idea that women should work. Capitalists convince people of this axiom through the mainstream media not by debating it and convincing people of its truth per se, but by making people assume its truth through an entirely different and superficial debate.
A debate that can only occur if the desired axiom is assumed to be true in the first place. In this manner, the power structure (meaning capitalist interests) are protected through the medium of debate. Framing debates in such a way can be repeated ad nauseam for any axiom or value to literally develop an entire worldview in whoever is unfortunate enough not to know better. To put it more bluntly, you can argue with everyone else about how good Obama looks in a coffee colored suit, but you can’t argue about how much power the president really has. Or, in a more extreme example, you can argue about how much power the president has, but you can’t argue about why we have a democracy in the first place.
Examples of Debates that Maintain Assumed Values
To use other examples, take the recent debates in the US over Obamacare. The superficial side of the debate is summed up by these viewpoints: some argue that government subsidized insurance provided by Obamacare is bad for business and unconstitutional, while some argue that healthcare is a “human right” and support it.
While the mainstream media will mention and hold debates between these viewpoints, what it won’t question is the model of using insurance to provide health care in the first place. We’ll never be allowed to talk about the axiomatic level of the discussion as long as the mainstream media controls the debate.
Take note that both the Democratic and Republican parties favor the utilization of the insurance model. Who are they really protecting? Why protect the insurance model when it is such a bad value? I imagine insurance companies have a lot of influence over this particular debate.
Similarly, the advance of ISIS after the fall of Mosul in mid 2014 caused the US to intervene yet again in Iraq. The debate at that time was whether the US should carpet bomb Islamic State (Republican position) or provide humanitarian aid to refugees fleeing Islamic State (Democrat Position). Analogous viewpoints were adopted during the Libya intervention in 2011, or the Invasion of Iraq in 2003; the Left will typically talk of humanitarian intervention to justify military action, while the Right will advocate crushing the enemy because they directly threaten the nation, but the end result is still the same: the enemy gets bombed, which is what the system wanted anyway.
The debates on the issue are just there to make people think that they have some input in the way the system acts, when in fact it is the people who control the debates that have the greatest influence by controlling what is an axiom and what is not, what is assumed for the debate to occur, and what is not.
Why Should the Manosphere Care?
The manosphere needs to understand how debates work and what they can achieve. If our opponents, especially feminists and progressives, in the mainstream media continue to control debates and therefore control the axioms and values people unconsciously adopt, they will effectively continue to control legislation in the US and other western republics in ways that are harmful to the manosphere by controlling the opinion of voters.
What the manosphere must do is take the fight to the enemy. Instead of getting trapped in the rigged debates of our opponents, we must attack the axioms and values that their debates are based upon in the first place. If we take part in their debates, we are shooting ourselves in the foot because involvement requires conceding to their worldview at some level.
Absent of some paradigm-shifting technology, or the rise of some kind of hypothetical “manosphere philosopher king” to install a beneficial totalitarian dictatorship, we must use the means provided by representative democracy and fight for the control of voter opinion in order to get the legislation that would best serve the manosphere. Until then, we are left with this:
No it doesn’t Eliot, no it doesn’t…
But maybe it will.
Read More: How To Turn A Small Victory Against Mainstream Media Into A Red Pill Movement
