If you aren’t Scrooge, maybe you should consider emulating him in at least one aspect of your life.
Is it fitting that humbug entered the language as a student expression during the beginning of the Industrial Age? Traced to the 1750s, the word came to mean “deceiver,” the noun, and “deceive by false pretext,” the transitive verb.
Eventually, according to Online Etymology Dictionary, by 1825, humbug evolved to mean “sham,” “imposition,” “hollowness,” and “spirit of deception.” The association with “spirit” aligns with the famous Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge in which the author employs three spirits to convert the irascible old Ebeneezer into a happy proponent of Christmastime charity and joy. * Until his emotional conversion, Scrooge, you’ll recall, was fond of dismissing Christmas with “Bah! Humbug!” until those spirits showed him Christmas past, present, and future. With regard to Christmas future, Scrooge asks at his untended gravestone whether or not his future is predestined or changeable. Happily, he discovers that his future is not predetermined on the basis of his past and that by changing his present course, he can shape his future.
That the word humbug originated at the beginning of the Industrial and Technological Age does seem fitting. Advances in both industry and technology generated a class of wealth separate from aristocratic primogeniture and entitled inheritance, making those formerly relegated to servitude into a new class of keep-up-with-the-Joneses rich. A new form of entitlement entered the West with producers requiring merchants requiring bankers. It was this change in society that led to a new form of corrupt politician, one who could glom onto the wealth of others either through graft or through the power to distribute taxes. At the same time, the rise of widespread media in the form first of news sheets, then papers, radio, TV, and ultimately the Web, gave those in power means of controlling the narrative of the times.
In the twenty-first century, we stand at the culmination of efforts to control narratives and to spread humbuggery wide and far. Deceit is no longer localized. It can propagandize a nation or a continent. It can propagandize the world. We live in a world of scams and shams too numerous to mention. Some alter the lives of individuals. Others alter the lives of entire populations. The narrative of twentieth and twenty-first century dictators, for example, has led to the impoverishment, enslavement, and deaths of millions and to inordinate wealth for the elite few. And the humbuggery spread ironically through the quashing of personal skepticism. Whereas the skeptic can look at the narrative of the day and proclaim, “Bah, Humbug,” the manipulated masses have lost their inner Scrooges to a willful compliance to or acquiescence to the mainstream narrative.
Losing one’s inner Scrooge makes a potentially or formerly free person into a slave to the propagandists. Knowing this, self-aggrandizing politicians more intent on acquiring and keeping power and wealth than on serving constituents have aligned themselves with a compliant Press. Supported by a media that has lost its inner Scrooge, deceivers affect more people today than ever before, spreading deceptions with the aid of advanced technology, including AI’s algorithms. And in support, narrow-thinking pundits obsessed with an agenda they believe to be axiomatically true aid the dissemination of untruths. Want to know why Russian media and evenMoscow Patriarch supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine over Nazis? Want to go back to ask how Hitler convinced an entire nation that Jews were the cause of their woes? Want to look at the African-American population in the United States ignoring the historical facts of their slavery, oppression, and voting suppression by southern Democrats while favoring those same Democrats as better than the evil Republicans who supported their emancipation and civil rights? In each instance—and many more—the people lost their inner Scrooges. They lost their skepticism. They read or watched the news without once uttering, “Bah! Humbug”—unless it was to question the questioners, that is, those skeptical of the mainstream narrative. And all the while the masses relinquished their sense of doubt, those in control spread actual humbug, actual deceit with their help.
The recently revealed American government insider deception about “Russian collusion” with regard first to the Trump campaign of 2016 and then with regard to the Hunter Biden laptop, plus a plethora of social media feeds that mainstream editors and pundits perpetrated to shroud the nation with deception that favors one party over another, really make recent years a true Age of Humbug. Yet, the phenomenon of humbug as we know it today is as old as the word humbug’s first use in what has become ever more insidious propaganda. Public manipulation through widespread deceit goes back at least to the eighteenth century and the proliferation of newspapers. Whereas a former ecclesiastical and secular aristocracy simply set up inviolable rules for a largely rural or feudal society, a new self-proclaimed aristocracy of self-proclaimed intellectual and wealthy influencers gained political power and control of information. Nevetheless, today’s culmination of deception shouldn’t surprise anyone. We’ve been on a multi-century journey to this point, starting with the use of the word humbug by those university students almost three centuries ago. **
The modern industrial-technological complex that gave rise to modern humbuggery seems to have more than just a coincidental synchronicity with the proliferation of deceit that they so adroitly exploit. Cannabis? Tobacco? Hexachlorophene? Red dye number whatever? Above ground nuclear testing? Bisphenol A (BPA)? Green tech in windmills that ceaselessly turn and a sun that always shines? From products to processing, individuals need to question and to doubt. You need to doubt.
Caught in the networks of deception, the propagandized are either unaware of or do not care about the reality of collusion among politicians, cushioned bureaucrats, and media. Those who have relinquished their inner Scrooge to the propagandists are living lives of self deception or fear. The latter rises from the threat of ostracism or defamation because today’s humbuggers have empowered themselves to silence any who might call their deceptions “humbug.” Compliance and exile seem to be the only choices modern westerners have. Think that is humbug on my part? Try countering the global warming mob with data that conflicts with models, with logic that conflicts with beliefs, such as the world will end in 12 years, *** or with complaints about 50,000 “experts” flying off to conferences just to agree that “something has to be done.
Those who have paid attention to recent deceptions by government officials, particularly by those in the Intel agencies and FBI, have a healthy Bah-Humbuggery skepticism about any pronouncement by compliant media and government officials bent on keeping their power through deceit in the daily narrative. Independent and skeptical Scrooges refuse to accept those self-serving agendas based on deceit. But there is a consequence to the temerity of showing one’s inner Scrooge: Relentless ad hominem attacks by total strangers and a vindictive Press. The inner Scrooge has to overcome an innate pressure to bond to likeminded people, a pressure that derives from our gregarious nature.
Yet, being skeptical is as much an inborn defense mechanism as gregariousness is a comfort mechanism. When politicians pronounce that the “border is closed” as hundreds of thousands race across it, when politicians claim that after a rise in gas prices, a slight fall “puts money back in the pockets of consumers” (though they still have to pay prices higher than those of preceding years), when an 8% inflation that drops to 7.8% is seen as economic growth for the middle class, and when they claim “inclusiveness” is proper while it comes from exclusion of unfavored subcultures and their agendas slowly become law, yes, when all this humbug and other humbugs are broadcast as wonderful news over which we commoners should be happy, just pointing out the humbuggery can get one ostracized by the politically powerful and condescending rich elite. The skeptic who counters the propagandist always takes a risk. The person with a different story to tell finds few who will disseminate that story. Skepticism breeds loneliness, the bane of a gregarious species.
Oh! That Scrooge’s ghosts could visit all the hypocrites of our time! Oh! If Jacob Marley could just drag his chains once across the floor of the newsroom or the cathedral of the Patriarch of Moscow. If those spirits were to visit, we might find that our future isn’t predestined by propagandists, and that we are truly free to think and do as we wish. And Oh! We don’t have to be Scroogian misanthropes to say, “Bah! Humbug.” **** We just have to question, to doubt, and to recognize humbug when we see it. On the contrary, recognizing what is humbug will do more to ensure a future peopled by independent thinkers.
*1843. A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas. If you haven’t read it, you have probably seen it in a theater or on TV in one or more of its many reiterations. The main character’s name has become part of the English language, generally indicating one with a misanthropic and greedy personality.
**In my own school days, my classmates and I used to use bunk as our substitute for humbug. Bunk derives from Buncombe County, NC, and a meaningless but prolonged congressional speech by its representative Felix Walker who wanted his constituents to believe he was “on the job” simply because he talked to the House. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he confessed, "but to Buncombe." Since 1841, bunk has evolved to mean “nonsense,” and, by extension, “humbug.” As a high school student, I was unaware of the etymology, but I did use it when I was skeptical: “That’s a bunch of bunk.”
***“Millennials, and Gen z, and all these folks that come after us, are looking up and we’re like ‘the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'” @AOC #MLKNow #MLK2019 pic.twitter.com/fbUxr2C0tJ
****Skepticism isn’t misanthropy, though individual skeptics, like the fictional Scrooge, can be misanthropic.
Is it fitting that humbug entered the language as a student expression during the beginning of the Industrial Age? Traced to the 1750s, the word came to mean “deceiver,” the noun, and “deceive by false pretext,” the transitive verb.
Eventually, according to Online Etymology Dictionary, by 1825, humbug evolved to mean “sham,” “imposition,” “hollowness,” and “spirit of deception.” The association with “spirit” aligns with the famous Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge in which the author employs three spirits to convert the irascible old Ebeneezer into a happy proponent of Christmastime charity and joy. * Until his emotional conversion, Scrooge, you’ll recall, was fond of dismissing Christmas with “Bah! Humbug!” until those spirits showed him Christmas past, present, and future. With regard to Christmas future, Scrooge asks at his untended gravestone whether or not his future is predestined or changeable. Happily, he discovers that his future is not predetermined on the basis of his past and that by changing his present course, he can shape his future.
That the word humbug originated at the beginning of the Industrial and Technological Age does seem fitting. Advances in both industry and technology generated a class of wealth separate from aristocratic primogeniture and entitled inheritance, making those formerly relegated to servitude into a new class of keep-up-with-the-Joneses rich. A new form of entitlement entered the West with producers requiring merchants requiring bankers. It was this change in society that led to a new form of corrupt politician, one who could glom onto the wealth of others either through graft or through the power to distribute taxes. At the same time, the rise of widespread media in the form first of news sheets, then papers, radio, TV, and ultimately the Web, gave those in power means of controlling the narrative of the times.
In the twenty-first century, we stand at the culmination of efforts to control narratives and to spread humbuggery wide and far. Deceit is no longer localized. It can propagandize a nation or a continent. It can propagandize the world. We live in a world of scams and shams too numerous to mention. Some alter the lives of individuals. Others alter the lives of entire populations. The narrative of twentieth and twenty-first century dictators, for example, has led to the impoverishment, enslavement, and deaths of millions and to inordinate wealth for the elite few. And the humbuggery spread ironically through the quashing of personal skepticism. Whereas the skeptic can look at the narrative of the day and proclaim, “Bah, Humbug,” the manipulated masses have lost their inner Scrooges to a willful compliance to or acquiescence to the mainstream narrative.
Losing one’s inner Scrooge makes a potentially or formerly free person into a slave to the propagandists. Knowing this, self-aggrandizing politicians more intent on acquiring and keeping power and wealth than on serving constituents have aligned themselves with a compliant Press. Supported by a media that has lost its inner Scrooge, deceivers affect more people today than ever before, spreading deceptions with the aid of advanced technology, including AI’s algorithms. And in support, narrow-thinking pundits obsessed with an agenda they believe to be axiomatically true aid the dissemination of untruths. Want to know why Russian media and evenMoscow Patriarch supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine over Nazis? Want to go back to ask how Hitler convinced an entire nation that Jews were the cause of their woes? Want to look at the African-American population in the United States ignoring the historical facts of their slavery, oppression, and voting suppression by southern Democrats while favoring those same Democrats as better than the evil Republicans who supported their emancipation and civil rights? In each instance—and many more—the people lost their inner Scrooges. They lost their skepticism. They read or watched the news without once uttering, “Bah! Humbug”—unless it was to question the questioners, that is, those skeptical of the mainstream narrative. And all the while the masses relinquished their sense of doubt, those in control spread actual humbug, actual deceit with their help.
The recently revealed American government insider deception about “Russian collusion” with regard first to the Trump campaign of 2016 and then with regard to the Hunter Biden laptop, plus a plethora of social media feeds that mainstream editors and pundits perpetrated to shroud the nation with deception that favors one party over another, really make recent years a true Age of Humbug. Yet, the phenomenon of humbug as we know it today is as old as the word humbug’s first use in what has become ever more insidious propaganda. Public manipulation through widespread deceit goes back at least to the eighteenth century and the proliferation of newspapers. Whereas a former ecclesiastical and secular aristocracy simply set up inviolable rules for a largely rural or feudal society, a new self-proclaimed aristocracy of self-proclaimed intellectual and wealthy influencers gained political power and control of information. Nevetheless, today’s culmination of deception shouldn’t surprise anyone. We’ve been on a multi-century journey to this point, starting with the use of the word humbug by those university students almost three centuries ago. **
The modern industrial-technological complex that gave rise to modern humbuggery seems to have more than just a coincidental synchronicity with the proliferation of deceit that they so adroitly exploit. Cannabis? Tobacco? Hexachlorophene? Red dye number whatever? Above ground nuclear testing? Bisphenol A (BPA)? Green tech in windmills that ceaselessly turn and a sun that always shines? From products to processing, individuals need to question and to doubt. You need to doubt.
Caught in the networks of deception, the propagandized are either unaware of or do not care about the reality of collusion among politicians, cushioned bureaucrats, and media. Those who have relinquished their inner Scrooge to the propagandists are living lives of self deception or fear. The latter rises from the threat of ostracism or defamation because today’s humbuggers have empowered themselves to silence any who might call their deceptions “humbug.” Compliance and exile seem to be the only choices modern westerners have. Think that is humbug on my part? Try countering the global warming mob with data that conflicts with models, with logic that conflicts with beliefs, such as the world will end in 12 years, *** or with complaints about 50,000 “experts” flying off to conferences just to agree that “something has to be done.
Those who have paid attention to recent deceptions by government officials, particularly by those in the Intel agencies and FBI, have a healthy Bah-Humbuggery skepticism about any pronouncement by compliant media and government officials bent on keeping their power through deceit in the daily narrative. Independent and skeptical Scrooges refuse to accept those self-serving agendas based on deceit. But there is a consequence to the temerity of showing one’s inner Scrooge: Relentless ad hominem attacks by total strangers and a vindictive Press. The inner Scrooge has to overcome an innate pressure to bond to likeminded people, a pressure that derives from our gregarious nature.
Yet, being skeptical is as much an inborn defense mechanism as gregariousness is a comfort mechanism. When politicians pronounce that the “border is closed” as hundreds of thousands race across it, when politicians claim that after a rise in gas prices, a slight fall “puts money back in the pockets of consumers” (though they still have to pay prices higher than those of preceding years), when an 8% inflation that drops to 7.8% is seen as economic growth for the middle class, and when they claim “inclusiveness” is proper while it comes from exclusion of unfavored subcultures and their agendas slowly become law, yes, when all this humbug and other humbugs are broadcast as wonderful news over which we commoners should be happy, just pointing out the humbuggery can get one ostracized by the politically powerful and condescending rich elite. The skeptic who counters the propagandist always takes a risk. The person with a different story to tell finds few who will disseminate that story. Skepticism breeds loneliness, the bane of a gregarious species.
Oh! That Scrooge’s ghosts could visit all the hypocrites of our time! Oh! If Jacob Marley could just drag his chains once across the floor of the newsroom or the cathedral of the Patriarch of Moscow. If those spirits were to visit, we might find that our future isn’t predestined by propagandists, and that we are truly free to think and do as we wish. And Oh! We don’t have to be Scroogian misanthropes to say, “Bah! Humbug.” **** We just have to question, to doubt, and to recognize humbug when we see it. On the contrary, recognizing what is humbug will do more to ensure a future peopled by independent thinkers.
*1843. A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas. If you haven’t read it, you have probably seen it in a theater or on TV in one or more of its many reiterations. The main character’s name has become part of the English language, generally indicating one with a misanthropic and greedy personality.
**In my own school days, my classmates and I used to use bunk as our substitute for humbug. Bunk derives from Buncombe County, NC, and a meaningless but prolonged congressional speech by its representative Felix Walker who wanted his constituents to believe he was “on the job” simply because he talked to the House. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he confessed, "but to Buncombe." Since 1841, bunk has evolved to mean “nonsense,” and, by extension, “humbug.” As a high school student, I was unaware of the etymology, but I did use it when I was skeptical: “That’s a bunch of bunk.”
***“Millennials, and Gen z, and all these folks that come after us, are looking up and we’re like ‘the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'” @AOC #MLKNow #MLK2019 pic.twitter.com/fbUxr2C0tJ
****Skepticism isn’t misanthropy, though individual skeptics, like the fictional Scrooge, can be misanthropic.
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