alloneword » Sun Feb 11, 2024 4:00 pm wrote: I'm not completely sure that this apparent preference for 'good guys vs bad guys' narrative isn't in itself manufactured.
By that I mean that when content with a narrative framework which eschews such familiar patterns does somehow make it's way into popular culture, it seems to be both critically and publicly acclaimed - 'The Wire', 'Game of Thrones' etc. So it could be argued that it's not purely down to 'what the audience demands'.
Your comment on finding of a 'position that feels secure'... That crystalised something - it's all so
infantilising. 'Explain the world to me as if I was six'. Looking across my kids bookshelves, I find the odd 'original' versions. Spoiler: The wolf/witch/whatever eats the kids. The End.
Admittedly, to a certain extent in our daily lives we all place events into our own personal narrative framework, one in which we ourselves at least play the 'good guy', if not 'the hero'. Whether this tendency is innate, inculcated or a mixture of the two, it surely makes the suppression of our co-operative nature and the process of division much easier.
Reminds me of a subtler point in your last I skipped over:
alloneword wrote:One of the things that became glaringly apparent to me over the past few years is that the purpose of so much of this propaganda is not so much to tell you what to think, but rather it is carefully engineered to try and convince you what others think.
What I got from this, intended or not, is that a big part of the schismogenesis is making
us think that
other people think things we find threatening, without really testing this assumption (because it
can't be tested, on anything but a one-to-one basis; this problem is compounded, and then some, by the internet, where NPCs have become a literal thing).
For example, the possible push to make it seem as though more people were agreeing with the covid-policies & mrNA drive than actually were: this can then make us more on guard, more inclined to double-down and take a stronger, more defended position, than we would otherwise, feeling like we need to keep the bastards at bay (viz a viz TDS & the fear of "deplorables").
"Woke" proceeds this way also: it assumes a position of superiority that asserts that anyone who is right-minded believes these things (it is on "the right side of history"); that can actually cause many people to get in line, because they think they are outnumbered when they are not (so it is a self-fulfilling bluff); on the flip side, when we take an anti-woke position as a reaction to this, and feel drawn to people who do the same, we are falling into the same trap, potentially, since many of those folk may be insincere or in countless other ways untrustworthy.
My enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend, just as my friend's enemy isn't necessarily my enemy.
More importantly, it really can't ever be about numbers. All this group-think goes only in one direction, away from truth/the soul/reality, because if discerning what's true is based on how many people agree with me (or how safe my position feels), it is guaranteed I'll never get to the truth.
How much of the schismogenetic social engineering is all about theory of mind, creating it and controlling it? While we (here at RI) all know, for example, that the PTTB work day and night to control what most people think, what's less acknowledged or discussed is the effort to make us really
care what other people think (why should we? I mean, they might be NPCs, right??). We then start to imagine all sorts of things they
might be thinking, when truth be told we don't really know even if most people think at all (the evidence suggests not).
So my point about good vs bad narratives (which you zeroed in on) has to do with our need to cast
ourselves in/identify with the "good guy" position in
our own narratives (minds), which always involves casting others as bad guys. It doesn't really matter how nuanced our entertainments are, the fact is we always wind up investing in characters we like and (in a different way) in characters we dislike, if not detest; because otherwise there is no tension, no drama.
This is played out dramatically with any really sensitive issue around suppressed information and illegitimate (propaganda) narratives that do the suppressing (mentioning no names), which is when people "automatically" (though really they are being externally controlled but do not know it) assign an ideological motive and agenda (eg, Nazi! Bad!) to suppressed information, and specifically to the people who are trying to present it, which of course has baked into it the presumption that they are on the side of the good, and justified in suppressing discussion.
For me, it is only logical to suppose that the more fiercely suppressed a certain kind of discussion, research, or fact-base is, and the more it is cast in the role of "bad guy" and punished accordingly, the more of a threat it must be seen as by TPTB. Only a very naive (I am being kind) soul could suppose, in 2024, that such forces of social control (the ADL, say) would be genuinely protecting us from fake news in order to stem back some evil tide, of Nazis or whatever. (Though this doesn't mean there isn't such a tide, such forces may also be intent on creating it, and/or know that suppressing it is the best way to create it).
Not that anyone is asking, but I only stayed away from the subject of HoloDen for so many years, not because I ever doubted it had validity, but simply because I knew the potential costs were too high. How many others have done the same is impossible to guess, except that they must be legion. OTOH, I also lacked the necessary maturity to tackle it, so I am glad I waited. And now it is more apparent than ever how the two sides of the "debate" potentially reinforce each other, and how essential keeping them at odds is to preventing any kind of real dialogue from occurring.
And as Kollerstrom said to me in the interview, without the possibility of honest discourse, we are truly lost.