personal attack defines the periphery of acceptable positions in our political culture. all of the rational arguments happen within a space carved out by insult. the watchdogs – even the reality-based community’s watchdogs – are not rational animals.
President Obama has declared he “didn’t campaign on the public option.”
the net makes managing the memory hole a bit more difficult. with the ready availability of historical records, such management now depends upon the willful ignorance of the faithful in conjunction with the strategic ignorance of those who realize that truth only undermines the party and makes it vulnerable.
in short, most things are now hidden in plain site and people accept lies either out of a knee-jerk loyalty or a strategic calculation of political reality. either way, whether emotionally or rationally partisan, the label “Reality-Based Community” does not apply.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
[from a dkos comment...]
the primary problem with conspiracy theory, insofar as a site like this goes, is that it undercuts the fundamental premise of election-focused activism. conspiracy theories place the real fulcrum of power outside the agreed upon political system. once you stop believing that the agreed upon system is in fact the system in power – or put another way, that the agreed upon system is operating in the agreed upon ways – then the purpose in organizing politically to articulate a vision and win elections is profoundly compromised. to acknowledge conspiracy is to acknowledge that the system is being critically gamed by people acting in a criminal manner. that the system, in other words, is being run by secret means, responding to private directives and not the public will. so, even though conspiracy is the historically demonstrated norm of those in power, it remains an outrageous claim relative to our own country.
why is this? we have no problem seeing the conspiratorial character of aggressive, imperial, governments historically and worldwide. we have no problem accepting it as a fictional description of events in our own country. why not take the reasonable step of suspecting that the historical norm applies to America?
it’s another instance where rationality is trumped by faith in American exceptionalism. though of course, as is normal, rationality is prevented from knowing that it’s been trumped by a sense of emotional outrage implicitly certain of its justification. an emotional sense, that is, that the premise being asserted or suggested is outrageous. This, incidentally, is why charging Glenn Beck with being motivated by racism is an apt counter to the news that Van Jones signed on to a petition questioning the integrity of the official 9/11 Report. By fighting outrage with outrage we might avoid violating our own sacred premises while still protecting Obama’s appointment.
political reality, ultimately, is not determined by facts, but by emotional adherence to a particular story of national identity. it is because of this that Chomsky only gets on television outside of America. not because he’s not rational, informed and insightful – which he abundantly and obviously is – but because he articulates a worldview that denies American exceptionalism… including the exceptionally non-conspiratorial nature of American political power.
if this were actually a reality based community, the concept of American exceptionalism, in all its forms, would be rationally disassembled as yet another imperial myth. but this isn’t science, it’s politics; and in the political world, reality is determined by strategy, not by facts. facts are everywhere fixed around policies driven by cryptic reasons. driven within government by conspiracies of special interests acting in secret and veiling their activities by a sham public process of representative democracy; and driven within the public mind by unconscious processes of personal and collective narcissism.
as Reinhold Niebuhr remarked, “perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.”
but, again, people who have widely lost faith in the process are bound to exclude themselves from the process. so, it is essential, from a political perspective, to preserve your party’s sense of faith in itself and the process – and thus, to enforce a sense of disdain toward enervating conspiracy theory. theory, that is, that undercuts the potential value, and so the strategic possibilities, of the process.
the rejection of ‘conspiracy theory’ is part of the more general protection of faith in American exceptionalism – whether that exceptionalism is viewed as an historical reality or an historical opportunity to change (at last!) the dismal norms of history. reflexively labelling it, to put it kindly, crazy is just another instance of a characteristic emotionally self-protective behavior of social groups. by using emotional abuse to defend sacred premises those premises are kept free from rational examination and the survival and self-image of the group is preserved. just as GWB had a vested interest in declaring that we must never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories, so too does the Daily Kos community. conspiracy theory threatens the whole edifice of motivational identity. we cannot be the people we’ve been waiting for if the system is a farce covering for a criminal syndicate. in order to believe that we are them, we have to believe that the system is either essentially representative or that we are in a position to make it so by the commonly accepted means of ‘more and better Democrats.’ theories of government by criminal conspiracy undercut either form of this necessary faith.
of course in this sense the conspiracy theorist has already reached the complete cynicism as regards government that is likely near a majority opinion in this country. the conspiracy theorists, however challenged by fact, have been emotionally prescient in their complete disbelief.
and herein lies the root of the secondary problem with conspiracy theory: thinking conspiratorially can really drive you crazy. it is psychologically perilous for an individual to entirely lose faith in the dominant narrative of his or her society. to be alienated from this worldview brings a crisis in sanity. one becomes open, then, to truth – to actual reality as opposed to the storybook strategic realities of politics – but also to all manner of crackpot anxieties. even Hamlet, among history’s wisest minds, was driven near to madness by the awful truth communicated by his father’s ghost.
i’m having a hard time shaking the desire to respond to Ben’s idea (such as i construe it) that i ought (if i were, you know, to actually do something) to create some sort of public blog to facillitate a grassroots effort to map effective models for productive activism. as i’ve sarcastically expressed before, the fundamental flaw in this program is that it’s not mine. i’m not the one frustrated with liberals getting upset about the way our society operates but not being able to do shit about it. yeah, it sucks… but
a. that’s not my particular frustration, and
b. it seems to me that there are plenty of liberal blogs out there wrestling day in and out with the issue of effective action, and
c. i have no sense of how to moderate such a community, or even establish it in some way that it doesn’t become another political blog of the well-established form.
my frustration – which is something other than Ben’s frustration with me and other liberals who feel outrage but can’t effectively act on it – is with the general level of understanding, the worldview, within which politics is commonly framed. i want to find a middle way between raving conspiracy theory and the semi-conscious credulousness of the political mainstream online.
now, you can regard that as a sort of Ender’s Game fantasy of accomplishment. i think that’s an ill-informed read. while my particular writing may never be of consequence beyond the few people who come here, there are plenty of bloggers who influence our society simply by blogging. mass blogs are not the only way. and anyway, popular success does not conclusively measure the worth of activity.
which gets to the problem of being diagnosed by someone who has a portion of truth that they can’t separate from their own presumptions and hang-ups. point being: my problem is not that i’m not endeavoring to set up a mass blog (or donating money to someone else’s mass blog) but that i’m not diligent in the work that i’m already doing. yes, the format of Androids in Love isn’t focused enough. it’s a sandbox. the developed version of it simply isn’t a mass blog… necessarily.
truth is, i haven’t entirely ruled it out. i just don’t see how it relates to doing the work i feel needs doing. not the work that ‘the world’ needs, but the work i feel as if i’m slacking from. i’ve no idea how any of it translates into historical action. i’m not out to write propaganda but to formulate a worldview.
[here's a diary i wrote today over at daily kos... minus the poll. visit the diary to view poll results and comments. the diary continues developing some themes i've been considering lately, and will serve as a point of departure for a couple other explorations - one mentioned in closing below, and another being the development of emotional dissimulation in particular cultures.]
Politically active people aligned with a particular party live in a sort of self-created bubble. We engage daily, weekly, monthly, yearly in this ongoing process of making sense of the discrepency between our political ideals and our political representatives. Much as people complain about the complainers, it is always the fixers that win in the end. Not because they have the real answers, but because the outcome is written into the premises of the discussion. No matter how much the Democrats suck ass, this is a Democratic blog, and therefore it will always generate rationalizations to preserve some thread, however twisted, of faith in the party and its politicians.
And that makes us different from regular people, who don’t submit themselves to such relentless maintenance of their political faith. These regular people just get angry, and if they stay angry long enough, they slide on into apathy, hopelessness and utter cynicism. They lose their religion, while we program ourselves to keep the faith.
George Lakoff was wrong. Or rather, in his recent diary, George Lakoff glossed over the elephant in the room. Of course he expertly described the weakness of PolicySpeak, but his answer to the question of why the Obama administration has suddenly lapsed into PolicySpeak, after running the most brilliant campaign narrative in history, was insubstantial. His answer, that highly-educated liberals have been indoctrinated into an incorrect classical philosophy of cognition, is a general truth not applicable to the specific example under consideration.
The Obama people have already demonstrated a mastery of framing. While a refresher course is good general medicine, it doesn’t address the specific illness. The reason, in other words, behind the Obama admin’s sudden stumbling at something they characteristically excelled at during the campaign.
To regular people who aren’t so fortified with political wisdom, the answer is simple: campaigns are framed for the benefit of the people while laws are framed for the benefit of the dominant class. Being simple folk, they might just call them the rich.
The only thing keeping people from making this obvious observation, after such long and painful popular experience, is their faith in the moral character of the politicians they elect. This, of course, was the foundational narrative element of Obama, his basic frame. His touchstone: He’s different. He’s ethical. He’ll negotiate publicly with the big drug companies; He’ll end the unjust war; He’ll stop the surveillance and detentions. He will, in short, be an ethical human acting in the public interest and not another instrument of the ruling elite.
It’s really just a matter of faith. Because without that faith, as clear promises made openly devolve into murky policies crafted in secret, the bedrock cynicism as regards the United States government, both domestically and internationally, is revealed as certain truth. Regular people don’t subject themselves to the Daily Programming that maintains faith by easing the collision of promise and reality. They need the narrative.
And as Lakoff knows, the Obama people are well-able to provide it. They know how, and the story line is no mystery. The question, again, is why don’t they?
The more politically educated, or those of us who have access to the more politically educated through these blogs, understand, for example, that President Obama couldn’t, technically, propose his own healthcare plan – the one we heard so much about during the primary and campaign – and that the real plan that comes up for vote in the House and Senate will come out of committees. That’s the political reality. Problem is, the rhetorical reality of the campaign completely distorted this fact. We were consciously led to believe we were choosing between *plans*, as if the choice mattered. In the domain of common experience, that’s a bait and switch.
So, we’re left in the awkward place of having a set of natural emotional reactions that we must constantly find ways to disbelieve in… for our own good. That, i think, is one of the primary functions of Daily Kos: to talk people out of states of rage, despair and utter cynicism.
In my next diary, I’ll explore one hypothesis of how this function is accomplished, both here and in politics generally, by stimulation of the brain’s dopamine-based system of desire.
Having not yet resolved to be the change Ben wants to see in the world, I’m still wasting time over at Daily Kos… and, obviously, here. Noted cognitive scientist George Lakoff posted a diary there a few days ago, detailing (in, um, great detail) the Obama administration’s bewildering slide into PolicySpeak in communicating the case for reform of healthcare. As I see it, his prescription for how the Obama administration ought to be talking about healthcare reform is right on. It’s his answer to his opening question that I find lacking [emphasis mine]:
Barack Obama ran the best-organized and best-framed presidential campaign in history. How is it possible that the same people who did so well in the campaign have done so badly on health care?
Lakoff defines PolicySpeak like so:
PolicySpeak is the principle that: If you just tell people the policy facts, they will reason to the right conclusion and support the policy wholeheartedly.
The choice to employ PolicySpeak, Lakoff says, is rooted in deeply learned misconceptions about the nature of reason.
PolicySpeak is supposed to be reasoned, objective discourse. It thus assumes a theory of what reason itself is — a philosophical theory that dates back to the 17th Century and is still taught.
Over the past four decades, cognitive science and neuroscience have provided a scientific view of how the brain and mind really work. A handful of these results have come into behavioral economics. But most social scientists and policymakers are not trained in these fields. They still have the old view of mind and language.
The old philosophical theory says that reason is conscious, can fit the world directly, is universal (we all think the same way), is dispassionate (emotions get in the way of reason), is literal (no metaphor or framing in reason), works by logic, is abstract (not physical) and functions to serve our interests. Language on this view is neutral and can directly fit, or not fit, reality.
The scientific research in neuroscience and cognitive science has shown that most reason is unconscious. Since we think with our brains, reason cannot directly fit the world. Emotion is necessary for rational thought; if you cannot feel emotion, you will not know what to want or how anyone else would react to your actions. Rational decisions depend on emotion. Empathy with others has a physical basis, and as much as self-interest, empathy lies behind reason.
Ideas are physical, part of brain circuitry. Ideas are constituted by brain structures called ‘frames’ and ‘metaphors,’ and reason uses them. Frames form systems, called worldviews.All language is defined relative to such frames and metaphors. There are very different conservative and progressive worldviews, and different words can activate different worldviews. Important words, like freedom, can have entirely different meanings depending on your worldview. In short, not everybody thinks the same way.
As a result, what is taken as “objective” discourse is often worldview dependent. This is especially true of health care. All progressive writing supporting some version of health care assumes a progressive moral worldview, in which no one should be forced to go without heath care, the government should play a role, market regulation is necessary, and so on.
Those with radical conservative worldviews may well think otherwise: that everyone should be responsible for their own and their family’s health care, that the government is oppressive and should stay out of it, that the market should always dominate, and so on.Overall, the foundational assumptions underlying PolicySpeak are false. It should be no wonder that PolicySpeak isn’t working.
Right, it is no wonder PolicySpeak isn’t working. The real question is: why is it being used?
Lakoff’s explanation of PolicySpeak as a consequence of incorrect philosophical assumptions would be much more pursuasive were he not using it to explain the actions of an administration that by his own account demonstrated, in its campaign for office, a mastery of framing. Given this, his diagnosis of the problem strikes me as less an analysis of the specific situation than a projection of a general truth with which he is well-familiar. The fact that a “great many progressives have not grown up with, nor have they learned, the new scientific understanding of reason” says nothing about the President and his advisors. Lakoff admits as much in his closing gloss on the real mystery:
In the Obama campaign, honest, effective framing was used with great success. But in the Obama administration, something has changed. It needs to change back.
As I commented there (though without the reference to Marxism), the something that has changed is no mystery from a Marxist perspective on democratic capitalism: elections are framed to appeal to voters while policy is framed to appeal to the dominant class whose interests the government serves.
PolicySpeak is employed because it serves the interests of the dominant class, by preventing the lower class from articulating a unifying narrative of its own interest. PolicySpeak obstructs the emergence of class consciousness and prevents class war by obscuring the direct conflict between the common good and the profits of industry – a conflict that is uniquely salient in the debate on our system of public healthcare.
[the following is pretty rough, as is usual...]
Let’s put the cart back behind the horse for a moment and consider the nature of mass blog culture, as an instance of the nature of mass culture as a whole.
The basic structure of any mass culture is a set of rules, a symbolic set as Herbert defined it, substituted for reality. It is a paradigmatic narrative, like the jobs/gates fable, or the official story of 9/11. Written into this narrative, as Engels understood and Lenin reminded, is a fundamental inequality, whereby the interests of one class are defined as superior to the interest of some other. Or better put, where the interest of the whole are understood through the interest lens of the dominant class:
The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the ethical idea,” “the image and reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms and classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of “order” [in Dkos terms, the Admins and FAQ] ; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.
Herbert refers to this fundamental inequality when he writes:
In the maintenance of such a power structure [a power structure, that is, which has accomplished a substitution of some symbolic set ... i.e. a lens of class interest enshrined in taboo], certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity
I look upon the assertion that most people banned from blogs are done so as a result of their own emotional incapacity as half the story at best… at least insofar as DailyKos is concerned. Critically absent from that picture is an understanding of how authority is achieved by establishing the primacy of some symbolic narrative. The essence of law, again, is not the abolition of some behavior, but rather the restricting of that act to the preferred class. The narrative is the means whereby this authorization (however unaccountably… the more, the better!) is rationalized and conflated with necessity.
[The complex of ideas to be explored here is addressed in the in-progress Orthodoxy and the Reality Based Community.]
This conflation occurs pre-rationally, and forms the template for a partisan understanding of the world. According to this understanding, the same act is intepreted in radically different ways, depending upon who is identified as its author. Thus, the proposition that bannings are primarily a result of emotional incapacity of the banned does nothing to explain the numerous instances of the same behavior from accepted members.
By taking into account the basic preferential nature of the State (the established power) and the nature of partisan thinking, on the other hand, we arrive at a more complete picture of what actually occurs on blogs. Emotional abuse is a power reserved for the dominant class. It is rationalized, euphemized and only in extremity (to prevent, that is, the immune system from killing the organism it means to protect) curbed. It is never, however, relinquished as a tool… never truly taken off the table, because power is exactly the right to do what is denied others.
The primary sin on Daily Kos, as a political blog, is worldview… though you can believe whatever you wish, just so long as you don’t tell anyone. Emotional inapprorpriateness is secondary. As Barry Goldwater said back in 1964, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
[updated for clarity in a few places... bracketed elements within quotes are my additions]
Jones- I find ur ideas interesting and will continue 2 read ur blog, but our correspondance is no longer working for me, so i think this will be my last post.
fair enough. feel free to return at any point, should you like.
…i think the biggest thing we could do to improve political abuses is to come up with a sort of ‘common methodology for asserting the rights of the less powerful.’ a big part of building that will have to be the kind of ‘political pandit’ work u show special talent for.
glad you find it useful. you come back to this topic at the end, so i’ll have more to say there.
here’s my biggest sticking point in corresponding with u: i don’t feel like i can count on u to take ownership for the emotional content of the conversation, up to and including emotional attacks.
yeah, ditto. more on this below.
for instance, when i suggest that wilber displays poor use of logic (emotionally neutral), u recharacterize my suggestion as calling wilber ’stupid’, adding a negative emotional charge.
you’ve rewritten yourself here in a way that removes the emotional charge from your original statement. what you actually wrote was: “wilber’s ability to process information logically is exceptionally poor.” if i said that about you, what sort of emotional charge would you experience? would you feel i was calling you stupid? my guess is you would. in fact, in order to argue the neutrality of your expression, you edit it after the fact to diminish the emotional content, and then project the inclusion of that content onto me.
when i point out wilber’s specious arguments (emotionally neutral), u recharacterize my description as “your sense that [wilber] is a bad person.”
more misrepresentation. here’s a sample of what you actually wrote, in response to my question about what in particular you objected to in Wilber’s system:
it seems to me that wilber’s inner circle are confused kids in their early 20s who he takes advantage of by convincing them he’s the philosopher equivilent of a cult guru.
so my objection to wilber is not primary [primarily] with any individual claim, but the overall rationalization of a masked one-way transaction which excludes empathy, justifying whatever he wants it to.
in short, you identify him as an abusive cult leader, and say that your primary objection to him is not any specious argument or aspect of his articulated system, but this behavioral pattern. there’s no stretch at all to call such a figure a ‘bad person’ (especially if we understand personhood in the Confucian sense, as a being involved in social relationships productive of the common good… a similar understanding of human personhood is expressed by the Reverend Mother Mohiam in the opening chapter of DUNE), or to say that you regard him as such. your focus from the very beginning has not been on analyzing Wilber’s arguments, but on characterizing his behavior as that of “a cult guru.” it has from the beginning been a moral critique of his person.
elsewhere, you describe him as “yicky” and yet elsewhere write:
…wilber generally advances his claims via implication with an air of certainty (which seems slippery and dishonest to me)
clearly emotionally loaded terms of judgment.
thus, again, you’re misrepresenting yourself and projecting the disowned emotional content of your approach onto me.
or when i alluded to ur principal giving u a ‘harsh reprimand’ with the word ‘frustration,’ u suggest that my word choice inaccurately claimed emotional displeasure (frustration) because the word harsh indicates only an emotionally-neutral matter of degree (”a harsh reprimand as opposed to a mild reprimand”). but the word harsh isn’t emotionally neutral (like for instance “a strong reprimand”); it specifically indicates a negative emotional reaction (aka frustration) on the part of the speaker.
that’s an interesting distinction, but i think it’s off. a mild reprimand would have been a disapproving word. a strong reprimand would have been a stern lecture. so what should i call a man screaming and banging his desk? ‘harsh’ seems reasonable to me.
it seems to me that in this example you’re applying an unreasonable standard according to which i must ‘own’ whatever emotional content you infer. note also that you simply dropped the other half of the above example (which didn’t fit with the narrative you’re constructing), in which i demonstrated how your inference of my ‘confusion’ (another inferred state) was based on your own misunderstanding.
gates/jobs…
so u wrote: “my sense, for what it’s worth, is that you’re attempting to deprecate Wilber entirely – to render him as a complete charlatan [i.e. an abusive cult guru]… i think that picture is deeply influenced by your emotional drive here.” that accusation is not against any specific act(s) on my part, and so is an attack against me personally. however camoflaged, that’s an unfair emotional attack in the form of (roundabout) name-calling.
you’ve edited your jobs/gates story in such a way that it is critically not representative of what occurred between us. try this:
mr. jobs: i think two cents is insufficient pay, and that your policy is inhumane.
mr gates: i think you’re a hypocrite.
—your narrative ends here, but the story itself continues—
mr jobs: why?
mr gates: for accusing me of something you do yourself.
see the difference? just because i didn’t put the specific, refutable, item first, doesn’t mean i didn’t present it. i’ve presented it at length. in fact, we were just involved in discussing it. by leaving that part out of your example you edit your representation in such a way that proves your point but distorts reality. it’s a tactic simiar to ‘proof by animation’ whereby a critically non-representative model is substituted for reality and referred to as if it were accurate.
you have repeatedly represented my assertion characterizing your approach to Wilber as mere name-calling, made without reference to any specific behaviors. this is simply untrue.
the other thing i’m having some trouble with is our debates about information hygene, or the degree of conclusiveness of claims. yeah, i generalize about trolls from my personal anecdotal experience – that’s perfectly legal. it would be specious if i were to misrepresent that generalization as something more conclusive, but i don’t – how much more clearly could i indicate that i’m talking about what i’ve personally seen than to use the words “[generalized rule] that i’ve seen…”? it’s frustrating for me to have to work thru arguments about what is/is not legal in debate that u could easily pick up in a single class on logic or rhetoric (i think that stuff can only be learned from a human teacher, not a book).
[sigh] ok, you’ve simply ignored my question about what the point would be of mentioning your experience if you didn’t feel your generalization was a fair approximation of reality, i.e. significant. once again, you’ve edited the narrative, so that the story ends where you ask how much more clear you could have been than saying ‘i have seen.’ i’ll tell you: clarify the extent and nature of your experience so that i have some clue as to how to evaluate both the substance of your perspective and your intention in presenting it. (Chomsky is scrupulous about doing so in his talks. watch him.)
as it is, to say “everyone i have seen” in a tone of authority, without specifying the limits of your experience, is to claim significance implicitly, but in an unaccountable way. sound familiar?
i feel like we get derailed by tedious and irrelevant semantic arguments – it’s not so important to my point how u or i or blog owners define troll in regards to emotional attacks, etc. – the issue is i’m experiencing a lack of regard for my feelings and a lack of ownership for emotional messaging when we disagree, and it’s my impression that i’m not the first person to have that experience with u.
type of logical fallacy: anonymous authorities
beyond that, given your own history, what makes you so sure that this is an instance in my history and not yours?
i’ve said before i see value in just sorting one’s ideas out via blogging. but i don’t think the tao ends with merely sorting out one’s convictions. rather, those convictions only become valuable (and realisitic) as they’re translated into action. i think part of the tao is going beyond talking to become the change one wants to see in the world, and i think u believe that too.
we have no disagreement there. you’ve ignored the point, though, that it is entirely inappropriate of you to pass judgment on the general state of my life and self-realization. this whole bit is just absurdly out of bounds:
i think i have the same right 2 criticize u for complaining so heatedly about dkos, yet not be willing to step up & be the change u want to see in the world. i hear that starting a blog would take a lot of work – what *would* u be willing 2 do to put ur money where ur mouth is?
and that’s the (supposedly) emotionally neutral version, the walk back from ‘impotent complaining.’ beyond being emotionally loaded (’complaining’ is clearly a term of depreciation, ’step up’ implies a failure of responsibility, ‘money where mouth’ implies hypocrisy) and presumptuous, it’s factually in error on multiple levels. as you’ve ceased posting, i’m not going to bother going into them. for now, that you actually believe you have the right (not to mention the ability) to make blanket criticisms of my life, that such is the “same right” as my expressing specific, refutable, critiques of your approach within specific contexts of discussion, sums up for me where we part company.
it reminds me of a phrase perhaps you’ve heard:
shawbag, you know what you need is to join the army…
anyway, i entirely agree that it is appropriate that this discussion end. i would have preferred to talk about the prospect of an intertemporal map of revolutionary principles, and some other sort of site. as i’ve said, i’m totally open to the idea… i just don’t see yet what it entails.
Many years ago i co-edited the sports section of my senior yearbook. How i ended in that position i can’t recall, other than that all of the other editors were friends of mine. We created something we thought was amusing and it offended many people – at least relative to most yearbooks, which in their bland acceptability only offend any sense of originality and wit. Though there were eight editors, at least, three of us – myself and two friends named Jeff – were selected for a harsh reprimand from the principal, and to make a general apology over the shool’s PA. I forget which one of us actually read it. Probably one of the Jeffs.
The scope of things people took offense at was wider than i ever imagined. One girl’s mother, for example, never spoke to my mother again because i’d captioned a picture of her daugher: “Laurie, David’s sister.” i still don’t know why – and i can say for certain that i had nothing but affection for this particular girl, who was the object of my first deliriously innocent crush, in elementary school. I was particularly surprised to find the principal incensed that i’d placed the following quote from DUNE in a vacant ad slot in the back of the book:
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.
-Lecture to the Arrakeen War College
It was, he hollered, subversive.
To me, it’s been a touchstone for understanding the nature of control in social systems; and i’ve been reminded of it again in considering the last post, on the nature of trolls.
In particular, the bit about keeping the local definition of sanity out of the reach of common understanding. Which is to say, in terms of dkos, that the autocratic ban on certain topics renders any discussion of those topics as insane, regardless of how sanely it is carried on. The definition occurs on a level untouched by the specifics of the discussion.