Every communications expert knows that truth is rarely self-evident. Indeed, no matter how hare-brained or incredulous an idea is, if it serves the interests of a particular group of people who want it to be true, they’ll ignore any and all evidence to make it so.

Paul Krugman, an influential economist and columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote about this problematic phenomenon in the American military, where it is known as “incestuous amplification.” “Highly dubious ideas become certainties,” he wrote, “when a closed group of people repeat the the same things to each other – and when accepting the group’s preconceptions itself becomes a necessary ticket to being in the in-group.”

He refers, as an example, to the early days of what he calls the Iraq debacle, “where perfectly obvious propositions – the case for invading is very weak, the occupation may well be a nightmare – weren’t so much rejected as ruled out of discussion altogether; if you even considered those possibilities, you weren’t a serious person, no matter what your credentials.”

If this sounds eerily familiar, you might be thinking of the protracted campaign by Big Oil and the Alberta and Canadian governments to brand tar sands oil as a “clean, responsible and sustainable” source of energy. Earlier this week, I visited the Alberta government’s oil sands website to read about “Alberta’s clean energy story,” where we learn that Albertans “are doing our part to move the world towards a clean energy future.”

“It is crucial that the world gets its energy from regions that take environmental and humanitarian responsibilities seriously,” we are told, “and work to improve how fossil fuels are developed and used. With the world's third largest proven oil reserves, Alberta is front and centre in these efforts.”

Like the bogus rationale for invading Iraq, these preposterous claims do not reflect the reality on the ground; they are simply a preferred (and perverted) version of the truth created by a “closed group of people” (Big Oil, government politicians and bureaucrats, and the army of communications people who make this fiction real) who have been “repeat[ing] the the same things to each other” for decades. It is, in short, “incestuous amplification” incessantly amplified, and it’s dangerous.

George Orwell wrote about this strategy in his acclaimed novel 1984. “Newsspeak” is the deliberately impoverished language used by the state to prevent any alternative thinking. It appropriates language and distorts the meanings of words. And so, as Orwell imagined it, Oceania’s Ministry of Truth adopts the slogans “WAR IS PEACE” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” To these we can add, “DIRTY IS CLEAN” and “FINITE IS SUSTAINABLE.”

Although Orwell wrote about a totalitarian regime based loosely on the Soviet Union, he would not be surprised to find such nefarious methods being used in a capitalist democracy. Indeed, as Jim Hoggan pointed out in an earlier column, retired American linguist Dr. William Lutz identified government and industry as the worst offenders of using “language designed to evade responsibility, to make the unpleasant appear pleasant … language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t. Language designed to mislead while pretending it doesn’t.”

Obviously, capitalist democracies in the West rarely use overt force or threats of violence to impose beliefs on its citizens, but this is in large part because the state has learned it doesn’t need to, not when sophisticated, well-funded propaganda campaigns work just as well. The Group polls people to find out what they want – in this case, Canadians want the tar sands to be developed in a clean and responsible manner – and then distorts language to make it appear that our expectations are being met. This tactic confuses the public and, more insidiously, creates an opportunity for those of us who prefer not to suffer the worst symptoms of cognitive dissonance – depression, anxiety, panic attacks – to choose, instead, to willingly embrace doublethink: to embrace the mutually contradictory belief that has been constructed by The Group.

And so “dirty” becomes “clean,” and so on and etc. If the government says it’s so, and my neighbours and friends believe it, and mainstream newspapers don’t challenge it, then it must be true. Or at the very least, it’s easier to believe that it’s true than to believe otherwise.

It's an insult to our collective intelligence that the tar sands lobby can use the terms "clean" and "sustainable" with impugnity to characterize its dangerous energy experiment in northern Alberta. As violence and upheaval escalate in Iraq since American troops pulled out, and the country threatens to spin out of control and into civil war, it’s worth pondering the long-term consequences of believing what The Group tells us. For as I wrote at the end of Little Black Lies, a future built on deception will be a dark one indeed.

Jeff Gailus is the author of Little Black Lies and The Grizzly Manifesto. He writes about energy and the environment from his home in Missoula, MT.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ll know that the Alberta government is suing the tobacco industry for $10 billion. What may be less clear is how ironic this gesture of fiscal responsibility is, coming, as it does, from a government that happily perpetuates the same transgressions that got Big Tobacco in trouble in the first place.

“Each year, approximately 3,000 Albertans die from tobacco-related illnesses,” Premier Alison Redford said when she announced the legal action last May. “This lawsuit, to be clear, is not about banning cigarettes or punishing smokers. It is about recovering health-care costs as a result of the misconduct of the tobacco industry.”

The issue, Redford reminds us, is not that cigarette smoking kills thousands of people, and costs taxpayers millions of dollars, every year. No, Redford, like others who have sued the tobacco industry over the last 30 years, are outraged that these purveyors of America's most widely used addictive drug lied and lied relentlessly to the North American public.

Rather than come clean and acknowledge the scientific evidence that cigarette smoking caused various illnesses, the tobacco industry embarked on an insidious campaign to discredit the science and foul the public airways with deceptive advertising, all so innocent smokers would keep buying their deadly products (a crime that was sardonically portrayed in the hit movie, Thank You for Smoking).

This strategy, which has been used by other industries that make dangerous or polluting products, became known as the art of “manufacturing doubt,” after a now infamous memo from a senior tobacco official. “Doubt is our product,” the anonymous tobacconist wrote, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

It sounds complicated, almost impossibly so, but it’s actually rather simple if you have enough money. Corporate collectives have been doing it for decades: funding bogus science and investing in think tanks to produce dubious research results that cast doubt on legitimate research findings, from cancer-causing tobacco to global warming carbon emissions.

Add well-funded advertising campaigns that create a new reality irrespective of the truth, and corporations have been able to thwart government regulations that might otherwise damage their bottom lines – or at the very least make them fess up to the less savoury impacts of their products and services.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it should. The Government of Alberta, in cahoots with the oil industry, has been using a similar strategy to promote tar sands development in northern Alberta. The first step was to create a monitoring system that was incapable of detecting pollution in the land and water in the tar sands region.

It gets worse. To visit the Alberta government website today is to get a glimpse of what Big Tobacco’s website might have looked like in the 1980s (if there were such things then). Despite the fact the monitoring program has been roundly panned, and despite two studies (one by David Schindler and his colleagues and one by Environment Canada) have confirmed that Big Oil’s mines and upgraders are polluting the land and water in the area, the Alberta government website still claims that it conducts “a very extensive monitoring program” that would detect pollution if it existed, and that any pollution it does find is a result of “background loading from natural sources.”

This is but one of the most egregious examples of the kind of deceptive misinformation that has come to define the Alberta government’s approach to strategic communications. Like Big Tobacco’s efforts to maintain the façade of healthy cigarettes in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary, the Alberta government prefers to manufacture just enough doubt to keep reality at bay and the citizenry quietly complacent. Think doublethink, where inconvenient facts are forgotten and clean becomes the new dirty.

It’s possible, decades from now, that a cabal of outraged Albertans will sue the Alberta government for "misconduct" on the tar sands file, just as the Alberta government is doing to the tobacco industry today, but by then the damage will have been done, and the people and ecosystems of northern Alberta will have been forever damaged.

For now, why not pick up a copy of of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and see if anything else sounds familiar.

This is the second in a weekly series by Jeff Gailus on the little black lies that are preventing an open and honest debate about climate and energy policy in Canada. Gailus’ book, Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil, was published by Rocky Mountain Books in October 2012.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.