Promoted by Steven D. As James says in the comments, “This is some good shizznit.”
The media excitement over the “death” of “Zarqawi” does not excite me, but it has led to a plethora of diaries on several blogs. This is natural, but some of the postings suggest that many folk are missing the essential points of information war. Whence this.
There are many ways to enter a disinformation system. One way is to have psycopath(s) running your government, as is now the case in the US. In the US disinformation is organized. This has actually been true for several decades, but the increased scale of the of the disinformation in just the past few years means we are now a Propaganda State: The whole of our media works together to create a ficticious universe, that we are then meant to accept as our political and economic reality.
From a political point of view, this has been explored in dystopian novels such as 1984 and Brave New World. So I take that as understood. But I need to add that the centralization of media in the US has now allowed a single, unified story-line to be created at the highest levels of government, and disseminated through many seemingly independent channels to create an appearance of versimilitude. The system in America right now resembles the PK of Nazi Germany, with the difference that the PK had fewer channels, but did not need them anyway.
However, my perspective today is not political (though there are political implications) but personal, that is to say psychological. Simply put, when someone lies to you, they are trying to corrupt your understanding of reality, and when lies are organized into large-scale, coherent story-lines, then it is right to say they are trying to destroy your understanding of reality.
Elaborating slightly, disinformation is the technique of weaving truth and lies together so that the lies become more plausible, and the entire story-line has a greater feeling of truth. Disinforming is more sophisticated–and more effective–than lying, because most people find it hard to believe that truth can be used to deceive them. This is a grave error, and the propagandist counts on it.
There are many ways to assess truth. One of the easiest is independent checking. A key task of a propaganda system is to eliminate the means of independent checking, while simultaneously disguising that this is being done.
Another is internal consistency. This is not fool-proof, for a well-crafted lie will be created with consistency in mind, yet, the ordinary reality of propaganda is that it is targeted at people who can not think very deep or very far–most of us–and therefore does not have to be logically perfect. More important for the propagandist is that it feel consistent, which requires knowing the emotional attitudes of the target, but which is actually much, much easier to achieve. Modern advertising has created a large body of such knowledge, at the same time it has successfully asserted the (specious) right of corporate organizations to disinform.
There is a very large difference between systems in which some information is bad or falsified, and systems which consist of disinformation exclusively. In the former, ordinary tests of truth serve one to sort the true from the false, and further measures, such as noticing if some people are liars and discounting the worth of their pronouncements, serve to clean up the data stream. Elaborations on this are possible.
But in a disinformation system, sorting the false from the true by ordinary means does not serve, for several reasons: Sorting is time-consuming, and you cannot do it for every thing that you read and hear all the time; secondly, it is difficult to create a basic pool of known facts in the first place; thirdly, humans are really not designed for this, and it shows up as an emotional incapacity to focus that much attention. The upshot is that falshoods inevitably slip by, and you end up believing wrong things.
There is a consequence to this, and I should state it concretely: If you listen to the media, you will go crazy. This is unavoidable. This is because listening to the media is emersion in a disinformation system. Unfortunately, you cannot see it in yourself, but you can see it in others, so you do–as it were–get a warning. Also, as a disinformation environment persists, some people will break down spectacularly, and that you will get to see that, too.
Going crazy is not a on-off are/aren’t thing: There are degrees, and there are things you can do, even if you cannot limit your exposure to the disinformation more than you have already managed. Since limiting your exposure is the single most important thing you can do, I assume you have already done that.
I describe one thing you can do, beyond limiting exposure, in its parts:
- Reality exists. Your problem is that you don’t know what it is. But the existence of reality itself is not a problem. You remember the phrase “We create our own reality.” That phrase is batshit crazy. If they believe it, they have lost control of their own delusions. If you believe it, you are in deep, deep trouble.
- You will never know what reality is. This is not as bad as it sounds, because you can sort-of know. In a truthful environment you know quite well, practically speaking, and there is no worry at all. But as disinformation corrupts an environment, knowing becomes more difficult, and then it becomes uncertain.
- When you reach the point where your knowledge is uncertain, and you will, you must start keeping track of the uncertainty. This can be very annoying, but there is nothing to be done about that. You may go for years without resolving the uncertainty in fairly important matters. Sorry, that is the way of it.
- Eventually, the uncertainty will spread until you are simultaneously living in separate, incompatible time-tracks. Most of us have reached that stage with Zarqawi, if we go back and look at what we really know. Does he even exist? If 30 % of Jordanians and Iraqis think, based on their knowledge of family and politics, that he either never existed or died long ago, how does that weight my probabilities? And who did the US kill now? What are the probabilities around that? And so on.
- Living simultaneously in contradictory time tracks can be fairly unpleasant, but it can also keep you alive, as you select your actions to be appropriate in all the likely realities. It is important to remember that there is nothing wrong either with you, or with how you feel, for it is a natural consequence of living in the disinformation system. It is a sign of retaining sanity.
- When you quit retaining sanity, this will all change, but I won’t try to describe that.
- This all seems like a lot of work, and it is, but since most of propaganda is less concerned with arranging facts than managing emotional buttons, you will get a lot of clues about what is likely and what is not, and many story-lines will get eliminated. Better still, proveably false story-lines will point directly to the techniques of emotional manipulation. These techniques will form a pattern, and once you recognize the pattern, you can check consistency in both directions–from the “facts” to the emotional buttons, and back again.
- At this point you will have seen through the better part of their game and be ready to start your own blog. 😉
