The Trivialisation Of The GMO Debate - TruePublica
The Trivialisation Of The GMO Debate
Back To The Future With Laverne And Shirley: The Trivialisation Of The GMO Debate
– When people don’t possess sufficient expertise on matters, they
require simplicity. They desire easily manageable packages of knowledge,
and these packages become taken for granted stocks of ‘common sense’
that enable them to cope with or to understand the world around them, no
matter how faulty or misrepresented that ‘knowledge’ may be.
Powerful corporations and the media recognise people’s need for
simplicity. And here lies the problem. To rally the masses around
certain ideas and to make things ‘simple’ for them, corporations have
taken their cue from Edward Bernays, the modern father of advertising,
propaganda and public relations. Bernays knew how to manipulate groups
of people and get the masses to acquiesce and hooked on the products and
messages of capitalism. We are now all subjected to this type of
manipulation each and every day by the incessant bombardment of
commercials and official pronouncements.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has reported that young people see
3,000 advertisements a day and are exposed to 40,000 different ones per
year. It was not without good reason that the late academic Rick
Roderick said that modern society would fall apart if it not were based
on people’s addictions, whether in the form of pharmaceutical drugs or
consumer products.
At the same time, Roderick noted the trend towards banality,
simplification and trivialisation in society – the type which
corporations and their public relations arms excel in. He referred to a
rampant phenomenon of important issues and problems being reduced to a
fad of some kind through continuous repetition. The same few points
become thrown around so often that they constitute sound-bite
sloganeering.
Anyone who has followed the debate about GM food will be aware of such corporate-inspired banality:
1) Golden rice will save millions of lives
2) Greenpeace should be hauled into court for committing crimes against humanity
3) Critics of GM are stealing food from the bellies of the poor
4) Critics are liable for killing ‘billions’ – and they are also anti-science, Luddites, ideologues, elitists and so on.
We have heard such things time and again from bought politicians and
scientists. These claims are based on unscientific nonsense: for
example, read (here, here and here)
about the issue of Golden Rice, which they have consistently used to
beat their opponents with. The latest Golden Rice ‘laureate letter’
stunt confuses PR with facts (see this, this and this)
and demonstrates how respected but uninformed figures can be easily
manipulated to jump aboard the a GMO industry-backed bandwagon.
This manipulation is carried out by individuals with an interest in
promoting a GMO techno quick-fix for world hunger and who are blinded by
their own ignorance about the social, environmental and economic
impacts of this technology and the root causes of poverty, malnutrition,
inequality and hunger, which are beyond their narrow field of
expertise.
These slogans and PR stunts are designed to bring the debate down to
smears and emotional blackmail to sway public opinion in favour of GMOs.
They are designed to denigrate critics and side-line debate about
realistic alternatives to feeding the world, which challenge the
interests of the global GMO agritech sector.
They are also designed to confuse the public and induce apathy. The
strategy is that an ill-informed public will eventually just
acquiesce and accept the ‘inevitable’ creeping contamination of the food
system.
For the pro-GMO lobby, if the PR surrounding Golden Rice tells us
anything, it is that sound-bite repetition and ridicule has become the
order of the day.
Rick Roderick liked to refer to an old TV show in the US to highlight
how society encourages ridicule, trivialisation and acceptance of the
status quo. ‘Laverne and Shirley’ ran from 1976 to 1983. Roderick stated
that the two women worked in Milwaukee in a beer factory. They had two
friends who were stupid and ugly (according to Roderick). Basically,
their life was mundane and not good. The programme could have been a
socialist realist film, but it was a sitcom for a capitalist society.
All the troubles that working class life often involves were
dismissed and reduced to banality, just the common rubble of triviality
and little one-line jokes that people shrug their shoulders to and
accept the plight of people like Laverne and Shirley as a given and say
‘well, what can you do?’ before moving on to do some shopping.
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