"In a Society Gone Mad, the Sanest Person is the Person Most Understood to be its Greatest Fool"

[Sunstone]

Was it Kurt who said something similar in one of the early Star Trek episodes? Does anyone recall the precise quote?

My take is that is 'truth and reality' seen as one of its governing principles or laws of politics and culture in any nation on earth.

Especially today.

Today, because the 100 year old Public Relations industry has more than accomplished the chief self-reported goal of its leading American Founder, Edward Bernays.

That was to harness science with media to refine telling a lie into a tool of government he thought would prevent democracies from degrading into violent mobs who were biased towards murdering the minority scapegoats that lived among them, even as good neighbors.

Ever hear that notion? That was Bernays who most popularized it in America, who rooted it here.

He thought of propaganda as way that an elite, well-educated, trained-to-rule group of specially selected humans on the basis of their unusually rational thinking and wisdom -- could more or less be hidden well enough they could operate like Plato's Philosopher-Kings to wisely and benignly govern the people in guiding them to the people's own best futures, better than the people could do that themselves.

Basically, the 5,500 year old Sumerian self-serving rationalization for why folks ought to let their kings and priests call the shots for them, with the smoke and mirrors about it all working out somehow to be what the gods wanted them to do, replaced by something like "Enroll in our common cause to achieve a better life for you common folks via better men applying better science."​

At any rate, today in America, there are around 4 storms and winds of propaganda driving our political life, and so much more besides. Outside politics, the storms and winds only become more in number.

In short, reality -- any reality useful to any citizen in pursuit of his or her right to self-governance -- is up for sale via the Public Relations Industry -- even if someone doesn't actually need the industry, because they have their own in-house factory for it. Maybe they'd want something designed using some new technique for some special purpose, I suppose



For two reasons, I would read Edward S. Herman's and Noam Chompski's Manufactured Consent.

First, because that would be the best I could imagine getting at least one handle on what the real 'last remaining taboo topics' are in America. I mean, I guess that's supposed be us Anglo-Saxon White Males -- or anyone similar. But I don't feel it.

To me, Herman and Chompski signed themselves into the forced marginalization and forced irrelevancy that made them pariahs and outcasts in terms anything the average citizen or the American mainstream respects as socially acceptable enough to pay any attention to.

I think that might qualify those two scholars as 'taboo' in any Polynesian society -- which is where the world comes from. Of course, in America, it's hard to decide what the standard is for 'taboo', simply because most of us no longer know when we're speaking according to our own values, or according to someone else's values.



Not an accident how many good scholars get marginalized and made irrelevant in the public's eye via propaganda. Those are the best group, however flawed, humans have for working together in ways that give them the chance of understanding nearly anything more than a single, individual person might need help to understand.

Their core threat to every 'civilization' on the planet is always the same: Scholars are the people's best go-to for reality-checks on the propaganda blowing at them from so many confusing directions at once.

You can't allow certain truths to be anything less than marginalized and perceived as irrelevant if you want to govern a democracy as its hidden Philosopher-Kings.



The other thing Bernays forgot to think about was, what if someone was able to bribe, buy, or otherwise box his wise, benevolent Philosopher-Kings?


By the way, how does my new 'lunatic extremist' style of mixing up fonts and colors come across to you as me being a 'dangerous and threatening, yet so paradoxically profound babe-magnet' sort of a man? Especially, maybe thought of in the swoon induced sexual capitulation sense of that phrase? Yeah, come to think of it, I should scientifically gather data on that sort of thing, too.

Please respond by private PM if that's how you feel, deeply feel my 'lunatic extremist' style comes across to you yourself in a personal, emotional, and motivational way. Bear in mind, scientific progress has always and ever will require deep emotional commitment to it, and often personally significant self-sacrifice, quite often in the way of being indifferent to the conventional and boring standards of male beauty.

I've been conducting small-scale scientific experiments into the power and efficiency of propaganda, you see. The 'lunatic extremist' style is one of those. Purely intended to gather information and feedback that I can publish in a reputable scientific journal, you know.

 

[PureX]

Always keep an eye on the artists in society. They are the canaries in the coal mine. And they are the first people being either co-opted, negated, or eliminated when the propagandists go to work.

Just look at how thoroughly real art has been rendered irrelevant (just silly entertainment) in this culture.

 

[Stevicus]

Was it Kurt who said something similar in one of the early Star Trek episodes? Does anyone recall the precise quote?

I can't think of what it might be. Although I can see that if one is the only sane person in a society gone mad, they would appear foolish or insane to the others.

My take is that is 'truth and reality' seen as one of its governing principles or laws of politics and culture in any nation on earth.

Especially today.

Today, because the 100 year old Public Relations industry has more than accomplished the chief self-reported goal of its leading American Founder, Edward Bernays.

That was to harness science with media to refine telling a lie into a tool of government he thought would prevent democracies from degrading into violent mobs who were biased towards murdering the minority scapegoats that lived among them, even as good neighbors.

Ever hear that notion? That was Bernays who most popularized it in America, who rooted it here.

He thought of propaganda as way that an elite, well-educated, trained-to-rule group of specially selected humans on the basis of their unusually rational thinking and wisdom -- could more or less be hidden well enough they could operate like Plato's Philosopher-Kings to wisely and benignly govern the people in guiding them to the people's own best futures, better than the people could do that themselves.

Basically, the 5,500 year old Sumerian self-serving rationalization for why folks ought to let their kings and priests call the shots for them, with the smoke and mirrors about it all working out somehow to be what the gods wanted them to do, replaced by something like "Enroll in our common cause to achieve a better life for you common folks via better men applying better science."​

At any rate, today in America, there are around 4 storms and winds of propaganda driving our political life, and so much more besides. Outside politics, the storms and winds only become more in number.

In short, reality -- any reality useful to any citizen in pursuit of his or her right to self-governance -- is up for sale via the Public Relations Industry -- even if someone doesn't actually need the industry, because they have their own in-house factory for it. Maybe they'd want something designed using some new technique for some special purpose, I suppose

What are the 4 storms and winds of propaganda?

Propaganda is most effective if its writers have a good handle on what the people value and believe. Some of it is regional, cultural, and/or class-based. Propaganda directed at Coastal liberals might have a different effect if it's shown to Middle America conservatives.

One thing that's conspicuously absent in today's political culture is the lack of real debate or meeting of the minds between opposing factions. That's how these echo chambers develop, since rival propagandists talk past each other and never really properly or honestly address the other side's arguments.

There are still a few who are willing to debate openly and in good faith, while there are others who want to silence or shut down open debate - or engage in tactics of ridicule and/or "cancel culture."

 

[Revoltingest]

Although I can see that if one is the only sane person in a society gone mad, they would appear foolish or insane to the others.

Everyone thinks they're that one sane person.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

Everyone thinks they're that one sane person.

"All the world is mad but me and thee, and I have doubts about thee"

 

[Sunstone]

"All the world is mad but me and thee, and I have doubts about thee"

I was told quite specifically that proverb originated long ago with Pennsylvania Quakers, and that as recently as she told me about it, it was still something Quakers in those communities often enough did. Far most often in an endearing way between husbands and wives. She was not herself from those communities, but she was an out of state Quaker who visited her friends.

To me, the most important thing was, she set nearly scholarly standards for herself when she passed along the trivia, which was more or less a hobby of hers. Something I've only in any major way gotten into over the last ten years or so. I suppose that could have had something to do with her husband. A former founding president, current professor, and the least aware human in my hometown when it came to knowing how to rake the leaves in his own yard without tripling his work to do it.

When he and his wife moved into town the year he took on the job of founding a university, that fall was the start of something akin to an annual community-wide exploration via 'local information flows' of the incomprehensible cultural differences between New England University Presidents, and our town's shared, and agreed to understanding of 'commonsense'.

If you are actually familiar enough with small town gossip to know it better than to think more than two or three of local pariahs are actually malicious in what they pass along, then you know how small town gossip can easily get down to the level of describing the 'interesting' shoes you wore when you took out the garbage yesterday evening. It became that sort of thing -- for about two or three weeks each year.

I've never heard of any real small well-knit community in which the gossip is not something credibly beyond 99% only about knowing what's going on with one's neighbors, told in accord with the community's socially acceptable standards for intellectual honesty.

Tell any lie you want in any small well knit community where that lie will reach enough ears that at least a hundred people minimum will pass it back and forth between them picking it apart each their own personal angle, until everyone is satisfied they know you are liar, they know what kind of liar you are, and they know how much you could do to their community as a bonded group of people. Go ahead, tell any lie. See if they don't have enough tools to neutralize you as a threat to their friendships and relationships.

If you're single, and your on of 'those' kinds of liars, you'll never in your life any woman from that community who anyone else would marry. Even she won't really want you. Which should be concerning, because you won't find a job better than season work -- raking leaves, shoveling snow, mowing lawns, etc. And not having a wife will mean that you'll have no one but the most compassionate people in town to check up on you now and then just to see if you're injured, sick, wounded, or dead. I learned who those people were growing up, in the way of someone warning me to have nothing to do with them. Liars in a small town are ranked as murders or such, who have gotten out of prison, but no one really believes them repentant or reformed.

Lying is decisively the most effective, the most lethal, and the enduring way to destroy a small community. From what I can find, Americans have no realism about the dangers of propaganda to themselves, to their families, to their friends, and to their nation -- nor any realism about the kind of measures necessary to defeat 'it', except possibly in the small well knit communities -- such as a big city, generations-oll, stable neighborhood.

The communal response to lying is genetic, instinctual, universal human nature. It unfolds so fast and always in the same general pattern start to finish, regardless of where on earth I've read accounts of it happening, that it has got to be instinctual. Lorentzian version.

Only real difference to whatever response or lack of response there is, is the local version, changed to fit whatever amounts to being 'local' culture. Those variations are exactly consistent with Lorenz's Model of Instinctual Behavior.

Only time gossip breaks down in terms of its truthfulness for much longer than it takes to complete the final chapter of a polarizing family feud, or such thing, is when the community is sick in some way as a community. Something has happened on the order breaking friendships, relationships, and families.

Larry McMurtry writes so truly about a fictional small Texas community that I can see his novels as similar to sociological studies. But he sanitizes lying. Given his more or less warm themes, I don't see how he couldn't sanitize what can happen to liars, and usually does, and still sell novels.​

The Professor's year after year method was always the same. Orderly, and so systematically applied it was obviously based on his idea of some of natural laws governing raking leaves. Those 'scientific laws' struck even our family lawyer as too inscrutable to be well enough understood so as to be capable of 'interpretation', in the legal sense of 'interpretation'.



Excellent professor, though. He asked me to sit in for free on a class he was going to teach about the overall 'big picture' political beliefs on both sides of the American Revolution. That was roughly 40 years ago. I haven't read anything since about those worldviews that wasn't what he taught about them, even down to how the American's variety still had some straight-arrow influence on our poltics until a few years ago.



The man was also the only US Senator (from a New England State) who has been in some way self-delusional enough to think that taking care to speak honestly with his constituents about anything really important to them would get him reelected. Basically, he thought of truth as a shield that he could raise up between people that he thought of as 'responsible adults' and his enemies that he knew were fated to spin it.

You can never shield enough people -- enough humans -- in any human community (of any size) with only truth as your defense against lies. You will always and ever need your weapons of attack, and they are social in display and psychology crippling in some way or another to the liars themselves. In every which way, they destroy while they serve as deterrents to everyone, including the liars.

The 'Competition Among ideas in the Marketplace of Ideas' is not in reality a fight for truth that takes place in Jefferson's 'Public Square'.

Jefferson's ideal has always and ever will be a sanitized version of the routine response any small well knit community reflexively -- and always as savagely as it can -- launches as a knee jerk attack on any human -- human -- it identifies as a threatening liar in its midst. Jefferson knew himself what that reaction looked like when unfolding, when striking, and when destroying. Had too.

I never in my years growing up heard or saw any human in my town dare to actually whine about what was inflicted on them by our community enraged they had sought to maliciously lie about someone else.

"Pigs beg for civility, for restraint, for decency with their screams and squeals while being slaughtered. Not humans. Not even dignified liars."

That seems to me why no one whines when under communal attack. Everyone says they do, but that's just an idle insult. That stuff never gets passed along as gossip. Nothing that won't make the team cut for honesty ever becomes small town gossip in a healthy small town.

Some person or persons are the usual local version of truth -- which is usually 'truth in the flesh'. In such communities, truth is not meaningfully understood most times unless people think of it as "Joe's way of seeing things." You attack Joe, some will see it in some way or another as you attack his right to speak the truth. Especially, since malicious lies almost always start off as someone pissed off someone said something they not like and decided to attack the messenger.

Defending against lies is absolutely nothing at all like the Jeffersonian model of 'attack ideas, but not the people expressing them'. It's more like get at someone anyway you can, but be sure you fight as dirty as river mud, because that'll do the most damage, and do not let up until the issue is settled and permanently sealed.

In our town, the local equivalent of the 'town whore' was a person of at least some eccentric kind of honor and human worth to everyone. She had family, kin, friends. Liars had none of that. Only two or three were living in town when I grew up. I saw a handful more identified, group targeted, and destroyed. None of them stayed in town, except one combination liar/child molester. When he got out of the hospital where a boy's older brother had placed him for a months long visit with a baseball bat, he just disappeared. Even his mother didn't know where he'd gone.

The brother was more or less routinely dealt with by the Police Chief and Sheriff. He was escorted to a bus headed to some branch of the military's base for basic training. As usual, it happened fast. The law gets brother's and anyone like them gone to a branch of the military in always under 24hrs. It's more or less the way they give themselves reason to tell anyone concerned that they weren't fast enough to arrest a violent criminal before he left town.
​

I read about the Senator-at-the-time a few years before I met him in a barbed report in Time Magazine. He'd recently done something along the lines of publicly given a well-reasoned, openly honest speech on each of his precisely stated reasons for why we was going to vote someway. I only recalled the report for so many years as to remember him by it because it was strikingly unusual back then for a major news outlet to all but say someone was too much of an idealistic fool to be reelected, even from a State where his party always won. They nailed it, as he was a one term Senator.

The closest I come to that naivete, even in the slightest sense, is I haven't been embarrassed, shamed, or felt guilty enough about anything to change what I want to say or do that I can recall, since about 30 years ago, when some life stuff somewhat changed me in totally unexpected ways.

Big difference between that and being so naive that I don't know how everything anyone says or does comes across to something in us humans in a way that it becomes irresistible bait, and most likely without much chance of us seeing any hook, even when there is one.

It was all pre-internet, but he was as willfully honest as some are as willfully stupid. I almost never see that sort of thing outside of academia, personally.



His son met his future wife in a bar while attending an Ivy league school. Guess he took after his dad. She said she was 'reeled in' by her discovery of 'a honest man'. That was important to her when any man told her that he loved her. Daughter, and very much in line to inherit a huge portion of one of America's larger family fortunes.


I thought you might be interested in some ancient gossip, more or less from academia, despite boredom with academic gossip likely being an occupational hazard to you by now. Beyond that, just my mind idling in the background while I figure out what to do about an unapologetic liar.
,

Here, let me try to make it up to you with some music...

 

[Sunstone]

Everyone thinks they're that one sane person.

That seemed to be almost the personal mantra of maybe a half dozen professors who I heard say it in one way or another. They were in various departments, so it must not have been restricted to a particular academic field.

Near as I ever figured out, it most likely came across to them as a reminder not to be too sure of themselves, like some kind of 'let's go team', only very more muted than that. Feynman's is the best of the published ones, I think. Something like "Always assume some fool is trying to make a fool of you, and keep in mind, you're the biggest fool of all because that fool is probably you." I'm sure that's not it, but it's something like that.

When I think about it now, it's basically within the boundaries of the way humans in any kind of work group encourage someone they see slacking off when it's not laziness, just getting tired. Something like that, maybe. Universal human nature, 'wake up, get busy' -- a version?