DOGE: Transparency and Truth

Abstract: The US government has been the rope in a tug of war since the Declaration of Independence. Some of these contests were benign and other, like the Civil War, were lethal. DOGE is the wild card in today’s tug of war with a rope soaked in kerosene over a bonfire stoked by powerful meme bellows. On the surface, it seeks to reform government and make it more efficient. Yet, as noted in DOGE: Transparency vs Secrecy; Thieftaking vs Investigation, Musk may be getting his own rewards. There are constant reports that he’s corrupt and using DOGE for his own ends. Is that the truth? Beats me, and that is the problem. The chance to tame the bureaucratic beast could be lost as a victim of corrupted truth. We need truth to tame the bonfire and preserve the Republic.

In Truth is the First Casualty of…Unchecked Power, I expanded on the statement that truth is the first casualty of war. As I noted there, the origins of “truth is the first casualty of war” are uncertain and obscure. Quote investigator says it could go as far back as the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, who wrote God is not averse to deceit in a just cause”, which could also be tied into “the end justifies the means.” A more clear cut antecedent is Samuel Johnson’s 1758 statement, “Among the calamities of War may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” Regardless of whether the attribution is Aeschylus, Johnson, or someone else, it is an accepted truism.

And we are seeing it played in spades in today’s environment. Look at the Sturm und Drang over the meeting with Zelensky and Trump. Commentary, to include “expert” commentary, is all over the board and seems to mirror the part of the political spectrum in which the commentator resides. Some see Trump as a master chess player and others as buffoon. Some see Ukraine as heroic freedom fighters and others see Ukraine as a corrupt state not worth saving. And someone used AI to make it look a fistfight broke out during the meeting and posted it to Facebook.

I read one statement on Facebook this week that said Zelensky has $1.2B in cash and multiple homes and other assets, with not a single reference to back it up. If true, then it is almost certainly an indicator of corruption and a red star cluster telling us to beware. But that’s all the more reason it needs verification and validation. People who are sympathetic to that view will then quote it and cite it. By the third or fourth generation of citations, it becomes accepted as fact.

Now, throw in DOGE. In DOGE: Transparency vs Secrecy; Thieftaking vs Investigation, I discussed the lack of transparency in the DOGE operations. This lack of transparency is like the bellows that enriches the fire that burns under the rope in a tug of war in the opening figure.

When teams do a tug of war over a fire, the rope is normally soaked in water to prevent from burning through and the fire is controlled to ensure it does not seriously threaten the rope or the people. But what happens if the rope is soaked kerosene and the players work the bellows as they struggle in the contest?

Symbolically, that is exactly what we see in today’s political tug of war.

The US has had tugs of wars between factions since the War for Independence. Be it the patriots vs. the loyalists, federalists vs. the anti-federalists, the Jeffersonians vs. the Hamiltonians, the agriculturalists vs. the industrialists the north vs. the south, conservatives vs. liberal races, genders. The list goes on. And the media has hyped and fueled these conflicts since the birth of the Republic. That was one reason that instigated the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts.

But short of the Civil War, I don’t think we’ve seen the rope doused in kerosine, with a fire stoked by twin bellows. The rope is the state. If the rope burns through, what happens to the state and the people?

So what is different this time? Now we have a president that wants to undo 160 years of virtually unchecked central government growth (see Powershift, Part 1: Overview of the Inflection Points) in one month, using DOGE as its sledgehammer. We also did not have meme generation and propagation machines that play on peoples’ emotions and shape their opinions even when the message is anti-thetical to their self-interests. See, for example, Part 3—Controlling the Narrative and Cultural Hegemony and Critical Thinking and International Relations Theory.

Lack of transparency feeds suspicions, making people ripe for memes that support their understanding of the world and politics. If a child is taught that some races are “bad” and that others are “good” and that some countries exploit others, they will accept these memes regardless of their veracity or whether they operate outside the child’s self-interest.

The bellows on the left are the social justice memes. The bellows on the right are DOGE. Both sides pump these bellows with every step and pull they make in the tug of war, and the fire burns higher and stronger.

DOGE is the wild card. On the surface, it seeks to reform government and make it more efficient. Yet, as noted in DOGE: Transparency vs Secrecy; Thieftaking vs Investigation, Musk may be getting his own rewards. There are constent reports that he’s corrupt and using DOGE for his own ends. Is that the truth? Beats me and that is the problem. The chance to tame the bureaucratic beast could be lost as a victim of truth.