“Strategic communications” or Stratcom, a propaganda/psy-op technique that treats information as a “soft power” weapon to wield against adversaries, is a new catch phrase in an Official Washington obsessed with the clout that comes from spinning false narratives, reports Robert Parry.Complement of the false flag operation and often the preparation for it.
Is there an economic counterpart?
Consortium News
The Power of False Narrative
Robert Parry
6 comments:
The narrative simply is a story that displays our ignorance of or desire for a different reality, it tells us about the limits of cognition of the story teller.
False narrative is a bigger problem for science and engineering blindness than politics / economics. Narratives create the illusion of reality, a structure to think and limit what humans are willing to measure and contemplate.
Human beings think using conceptual models that heavily dependent on metaphors. It is very difficult to model reality conceptually in a closely representational way, and there is also no single way of doing this. Humans developed science and math as empirical quantitative approach based on formal models and rigorous testing through direct observation to reduce the human element.
This works reasonably well in the natural science, but not so well in the social sciences precisely because it reduces the human element, which involves qualitative factors in causation.
Even the most rigorous science rests on the human element in that humans use natural language to think prior to using formal languages, and natural language is embedded in context, actually entangled in it
Human can't stand outside of themselves. Knowledge is iaw the mode of the knower. Owing to our mode of brain functioning, we are disposed in certain way that we are not only minimally aware of but cannot become fully aware of.
Added to that, humans operate based on self-interest and while interest is individual, humans are social animals and have group interests. It is in the interest of groups for their context to be the dominant one in framing. This is the case in most spheres of life, but certainly in those where interest is directed at power (control) and wealth (material satisfaction).
In this case, interested individuals and interest groups are not only caught in an inevitable illusion of their own making but seek to delude others to advance their interests. In doing so they often also delude themselves.
"Humans can't stand outside of themselves. Knowledge is in the mode of the knower. Owing to our mode of brain functioning, we are disposed in certain way that we are not only minimally aware of but cannot become fully aware of."
We may be talking past each other here, but I would say that the distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence is precisely that it is able to stand outside the individual subject. Knowledge is knowledge or it is nothing. Also, all compassion and justice presuppose the capacity for stepping out of oneself and putting oneself in the place of the other, and of valuing objective truth over subjective impulse and interest.
To be sure, knowledge is in the mode of the knower, but to be able to recognize this implies the capacity for objectivity--relative knowledge is still knowledge, and adequatio rei et intellectus, as the scholastics used to say.
Of course, all too many humans "can't think", that is they cannot or do not make use of their capacity for disinterested thinking when the topic runs against their prejudices or desires. But his just means that an element of "passion" has entered the intelligence and has deformed or darkened it. As Dante said, "passion fetters the intellect."
We may be talking past each other here, but I would say that the distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence is precisely that it is able to stand outside the individual subject.
Read what's been done in cognitive science over the past decades. Don't need to read the studies. Popular accounts have been published by Damasio and Lakoff, for instance.
They contend that the 18 century conception of the rational subject as a mirror of reality that is still prevalent as conventional wisdom is disproved by the entanglement of reason and emotion in the brain to the degree that they cannot be disentangled in the way that is assumed.
Here is Damasio giving the keynote at an INET (Institute for New Economics Thinking) conference.
Human Decisions
I'm afraid we need to agree to disagree. What you say concerning "cognitive science" has no bearing on the principle I mentioned. Kant, the "poisonous spider" has already enunciated the critical errors that are prolonged by your thesis. Essentially it amounts to digging a grave for intelligence.
Kant is considered by some to be he forerunner of cognitive science. According to Kant's analysis, what humans experience as reality is constructed iaw the human mode of knowing, which Kant analyzes in terms of a priori conditions.
According to cognitive science, in his attempt to reconcile Continental rationalism and British empiricism in his transcendental idealism (human do not know things-in themselves) he got partly right and partly wrong. He was correct about reality as experience and rational knowledge about it is constructed subjectively, he was unaware of the brain's functional role in this and how brain functioning entangle so the called rational and emotional.
One can claim that Kant was correct and contemporary scientific findings are wrong, but ….
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