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Activists as Knowledge Workers9.doc
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74 KB | politicstahl | Mar 24, 2007 | ||||||||
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Activists as Knowledge Workers
Activists
as Knowledge Workers
by
Donald
E. Stahl
I:
Types of Resistance
“Nothing strikes the student of public opinion and
democracy more forcefully than the paucity of information most people
possess about politics.”John
A. Ferejohn (“Information and the Electoral Process,” in John A.
Ferejohn and James H. Kuklinski, (edd.), Information
and Democratic Processes, (U. of Illinois
Press, 1990), p. 3) “…most political information is too costly
and of too little use for most of us to bother to try to acquire it.”
(p. 13). “Political institutions are an expression of the division
of labor: they permit small numbers of officials to regulate and
direct social processes without having to consult regularly with the
rest of us. In this sense, political institutions economize on the
distribution and processing of information. We elect officials to
learn about things that might affect us and then to act on our behalf
as we would if we had the same information.” (p. 6.)
“The two simplest truths I know about the distribution
of political information in modern electorates are that the mean is
low and the variance is high.”
Phillip E. Converse, “Popular Representation and the Distribution
of Information.” (op. cit.,
p. 372).
“In the Knowledge Society, it is imperative that we
learn how to make sure that the right information gets to the right
people at the right time in the right form.”Keith
Devlin, Infosense: Turning Information into
Knowledge, ( Freeman, 2001, p. 199).
“After spending the better part of the last five years
treating these theories with utmost skepticism, I have devoted
serious time to actually studying them in recent months, and have
also carefully watched several videos that are available on the
subject. I have come to believe that significant parts of the 9/11
theories are true, and that therefore significant parts of the
‘official story’ put out by the U.S. government and the 9/11
Commission are false.”Bill
Christison, former Director of CIA's Office of Regional and Political
Analysis, Dissident Voice,
14 August 2006.
As
Converse says in the quote above, it is a truism of political science
that not many people are interested in politics, but those who are
tend to be very interested. They are what Converse in a previous,
seminal article called ideologues and near-ideologues. Now, as I
shall use the word ‘activist’ in this article, not all ideologues
and near-ideologues are activists; i.e., not everyone who is
very interested in politics is an activist. As the term ‘ideologue’
suggests, some people who are very interested in politics are less
interested in propagating that interest among the relatively
uninterested than they are in seeing to it that their fellow
ideologues get things right. The former are what I shall here call
activists; the latter may be researchers or theorists or planners or
organizers or political correctors or connectors. Insofar as one
addresses oneself to the uninterested one is an activist. Insofar as
one addresses oneself to one’s fellow ideologues, one isn’t. In
writing this article, I am not engaging in activism, since I am
addressing only fellow 9/11 Truthers. This is a worthwhile thing to
do, since we need to form an identifiable community in order to do
what needs to be done, and a community can only be formed through
mutual discussion, but it is not what I am here calling activism.
9/11
Truth, whatever its details turn out to be, is perfectly suited to
activism, because it is a surefire way to make the vast uninterested
majority interested, if only they can be brought believe it. It’s
one thing to say, “Let George do it, I haven’t got time,” under
ordinary circumstances, but it’s quite another thing to say “Let
George do it,” when what he might do is kill your family, even for
the best and most far-sighted of reasons. This is information that is
certainly not “too costly and of too little use.”
.
We
should not think we are going to change permanently “the
distribution of political information” in modern society. That is
impossible, simply because of what Ferejohn above describes as the
division of labor with regard to information. That division of labor
forces itself on our notice. Information overload necessitates
information triage, and as activists our job is to make sure our
information makes the cut. I think everyone would agree that we
should use all the tools we can in order to do this, and that
includes scholarly knowledge about the human psyche, the mass
audience, and recent discoveries and theories about knowledge and its
transmission in society.
Let us
distinguish information avoidance, information rejection or
disbelief, information gathering, and information accessibility. The
more accessible information is, the less effort is necessary to
acquire it.
Information
overload forces us to avoid information constantly. Everyone with an
email account knows this. We see who a message is from, or what it’s
about, and we decide instantly, “I want to know more about this,”
or “I don’t want to know more about this.” We try to ignore
commercials on television. We look around the edges of ads in
newspapers, trying to find a scrap of news. We block out information
which we expect to be useless, distracting and time-wasting. We carry
appointment books so that we don’t have to keep relatively trivial
information salient in our minds. The average stay at a website is
rumored to be three seconds.
I just
recently learned that Dell invites its customers to return their
used-up ink cartridges to them for recycling, postage-free. I had
been simply throwing them in the trash, because when new cartridges
arrived I had what I wanted, and didn’t bother to look at the
printed matter that came with them, though it was in my hand. This
was information of interest to me, and quite accessible, but until
now unnoticed.
On the
other hand, information which we need for our particular situation
often must be sought in many places and assembled with considerable
effort. Even information which we know to be physically close may be
inaccessible. A telephone directory which carried all the entries of
a conventional one but was not alphabetized would be useless, even
though the listing you want is “right there.” Online, a search
that returns a hundred or more URLs is really only giving you as
many as you have time for, starting at the top.
Each
person wants something different from their telephone directory, but
even if everyone wants the same thing from a document it is still
possible for that document to bury the information, by means of fine
print, obscure language, and sheer prolixity. Since this is so, it is
also possible to claim that a lengthy document contains all the
information relevant to you when it does not. Sometimes, making such
false claims possible is the purpose of creating the lengthy
document. As every rabbit knows, in the United States’ climate, you
have to dig your own rabbit hole.
In
theory, information in a speaking human’s brain should be more
accessible than it is in a voice messaging system. Whether you go
looking for information, or information comes at you in an unwelcome
flow, sorting through it is the problem. A certain minimum contact is
necessary. In order to avoid ads we must know that they are ads, in
order to avoid emails from a certain source we must know that they
are from that sourceor
our email provider must know.
Devlin’s
claim about getting the right information to the right people at the
right time in the right form is something that
few people would explicitly disagree with, but which they habitually
ignore, especially in the 9/11 Truth Movement. Our debates about what
to do with our information are based on the assumption that one size
fits all. In fact, two questions are crucial in delivering our
message: how much time is going to be available for the reception of
the message, and who is the intended recipient? We will return to
this point shortly.
Chomsky
and other left gatekeepers allege that no one has the time to become
expert in all the fields pertaining to 9/11 Truth, and consequently
9/11 Truth is a waste of effort and a diversion from the supremely
important task of opposing the forces of darkness. Ruppert says that
it’s a mistake to concentrate on physical evidence because it
always can and always will be opposed by as many experts as the other
side can afford to pay, and no one has deeper pockets than the
government. Whatever the personal psychology behind Chomsky’s
stance, objectively it faces directly backward. No other tool could
conceivably be as effective as 9/11 Truth in restructuring the world.
Ruppert’s hard-earned disgust with expertise and technology ignores
the facts that today no expert will challenge DNA evidence, the
tobacco companies’ experts lost their war long ago, and. currently
hired climatologists are in the process of wasting their employers’
money.
But
handing someone a copy of Crossing the Rubicon and saying,
“Here. Read this,” doesn’t work, because they just won’t do
it. Sometimes, I know from experience, they won‘t look at videos
either.
It is
not that the relevant information is buried in Ruppert’s book. All
of that volume is relevant to 9/11 Truth, and the picture it paints
is essential to understanding, but it presupposes a commitment of
time which simply is not going to be agreed to by very many people.
Catherine
Z. Elgin's Considered Judgment (Princeton, 1996) has several
features of interest to 9/11 activists. Some salient instances are
her use as an example, "conspiracy theories about the
assassination of President Kennedy" (p. 144), her recognition of
the importance of emotion in the process of inquiry (pp. 146-169),
and her discussions of Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Rorty, or what she
calls "pure procedural epistemology" or "Knowledge by
Consensus" (pp. 60-100), which more or less says that what is
true is determined by common consent, since common consent determines
what words mean. (One seems to encounter this position fairly often
in broaching 9/11 Truth. Cf. Steven Shapin, A
Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in
Seventeenth-century England,
(
University of Chicago, 1995)).
But through the book another theme recurs which is of more direct significance for us, especially with regard to the tension between the strategy of using physical evidence, and the juridical approach which Ruppert adopts of pursuing means, motive and opportunity: the theme of composition and division of evidence: “connecting the dots.” "Justification is holistic. Support for a conclusion comes not from a single line of argument but from a host of considerations of varying degrees of strength and relevance. Indirect evidence and weak arguments, which alone would bear little weight, may be interwoven into a fabric that strongly supports a conclusion. Each element derives warrant from its place in the whole." (p. 130).
"In forging connections among initially tenable claims, we
integrate them into a mutually supportive network. This enhances
their tenability, each being more reasonable in light of the others
than it was alone. It also confers tenability on the sentences
we annex, transforming initially doubtful claims into integral
parts of an acceptable system of thought." (p. 104).
"It [constructionalism] can adopt considerations too poorly
supported for perfect procedural epistemologies to countenance,
secure in the knowledge that unwise admissions can later be
rescinded. ... It requires weak reasons to be more tightly woven into
the fabric of commitments than strong ones. But it allows that this
can be done, that collective action can compensate for individual
shortcomings. A constellation of weak reasons sometimes
constitutes a strong case." (p. 121).
All
this is tremendously plausible, and it highlights for us the
important fact that a strategy for activism proceeding via this
avenue is hobbled by having to use a multitude of different
considerations. It takes time, patience and memory to come to a
position from which one can say, “ALL these things can’t be
coincidences.” PR and other advertising professionals have long
known that mass audiences do not sit still long enough for very much
information to be brought into play; and we have long known that
individuals do not have much patience for what they do not want to
hear.
Resistance
to 9/11 Truth comes in different degrees, and it would seem to be
measurable by how little time someone is willing to give it.
Those
who are willing to accept free DVDs will probably look at them (and
those who buy them certainly will), but those who are only asked to
look at something, whether a book or an internet site, may or may not
do it. Without a physical object as a reminder, a promise is quickly
forgotten, just as a statement of fact, without some visible
corroboration, is quickly discounted.
However,
there are opponents of 9/11 Truth who are almost as much motivated as
we are. They nit-pick, name-call and publish wherever they can, even
counter-demonstrate and make videos. They are familiar with many of
the facts of 9/11, but deny their significance. For these
individuals, it is not how little time they spend on 9/11 Truth that
measures the strength of their resistance, but how much.
And
even knowing how much resistance there is doesn’t tell you
where that resistance is coming from. Knowing a little bit about
types and sources of resistance can be helpful in avoiding premature
generalizations and the unnecessary discouragement they can bring. I
shall now describe five different sources of such resistance, some of
them far more important than others. These facts help us identify
different audiences, and frame our messagesor
seek different audiencesaccordingly.
The
first, least important source, I shall briefly describe like this: no
matter how good a magician you are, if you show a card trick to your
dog, he will not be surprised. That is neither your fault nor his. If
he is not a member of your audience, he is still a valuable member of
your family.
The
second and third sources of resistance are the most prominent. I
shall introduce them via some quotations having to do with the
psychological process of defense, either in general or in some
specific form. Cardinal Caraffa said to his uncle, Pope Paul IV,
“Populus vult decipi. Decipiatur.” The
people wish to be deceived. Let them be deceived. As Truthers, we say
instead, “Let them be undeceived.” To do anything else would be
to join those whom Dr. M. Scott Peck has called, “the people of the
lie.”
“The
process of defense nearly always utilizes two tendencies analogous to
flight and the erection of barricades.” “It is important to
remember that all defenses operate automatically and outside of
awareness. Defenses are motivated, but they are not executed
voluntarily. The average person does not know what defenses he is
using, nor can he voluntarily stop using a defense if its presence is
pointed out to him.” “The basic empirical evidence of repression
is an inappropriate under-reaction to a relevant situation and
indirect evidence that the repressed tendencies are actually
present.”
I
think most people have by now heard that there are some who maintain
that the USG was complicit in 9/11. Some of them wonder about why
those individuals maintain that, but don’t know much about why they
would have gotten the idea, i.e., they know only what
they have been told by the media. People like this, who have minimal
information about 9/11 Truth, may be so either because they simply
haven’t been exposed to anything more, or because they have exerted
some small degree of effort, like Chomsky, not to be exposed to it.
Those
who are innocent of 9/11 Knowledge and intend to remain that way are
very likely to be what Bob Altemeyer has forever named Right-Wing
Authoritarians. George Lakoff explains (in Moral Politics) how
RWAs have come to have the political power they now have, and John
Dean (in Conservatives without Conscience) explains that
Lakoff in his book is talking about Altemeyer’s work.
By
“Right-Wing Authoritarianism” Altemeyer means:
“…the
covariation of three attitudinal clusters in a person:
1. Authoritarian submissiona
high degree of submission to the authorities who are perceived to be
established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. Authoritarian aggressiona
general aggressiveness, directed against various persons, that is
perceived to be sanctioned by established authorities.
3. Conventionalisma
high degree of adherence to the social conventions that are perceived
to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.”
When
Hayek denied that he was a conservative he probably meant, avant
la lettre, that he was not a Right-Wing Authoritarian. The Youth
Culture today may (or may not; I am no longer a member) have
identified this group and named them “haters.” If they have, the
name will not be appreciated.
RWAs
are found everywhere, but some professions attract them more than
others. They tend to be fairly common among policemen (I’ve found).
Altemeyer says:
“Compared with others, authoritarians have not spent much time
examining evidence, thinking critically, reaching independent
conclusions, and seeing whether their conclusions mesh with the other
things they believe. Instead, they have largely accepted what they
were told by the authorities in their lives, which leaves them time
for other things, but which also leaves them unpracticed in thinking
for themselves.” “There was virtually nothing about themselves
Highs [high-scoring RWAs] were unwilling to face and deal with,
according to them. Yet when we told some High RWAs they were low in
self-esteem, and that this had serious implications for their future,
a lot of authoritarians fled from the news, not even checking to see
if it was correct. And many Highs told us, point blank, that if it
turned out they were more prejudiced than average, they did not want
to be told.”
RWAs
are good at ignoring what they don’t want to know, although this
probably does not indicate anything about Chomsky. If you find you’re
dealing with someone who just doesn’t want to know anything about
9/11 Truth, suspect an RWA. RWAs don’t need to learn anything about
9/11 Truth, because they know everything already. At least this
appears to be the case at this stage of Truth’s disclosure. When it
is more widely disseminated and deeply accepted, that may change.
What will not change is their attitude to learning about themselves.
The
sheer hatred shown by the counter demonstrators and video makers who
oppose the NY 9/11 Truth group indicates that these individuals are
RWAs who have acquired a small degree of Truth knowledge. Right-Wing
Authoritarianism’s third component probably explains the opposition
of such organizations as CSICOP to 9/11 Truth.
Remember
that a great proportion of Truthers started out by trying to refute
the evidence they were exposed to, and that Bill Christison spent
“the better part of the last five years” opposing 9/11 Truth
before he decided to find out what he was opposing. If and when RWAs
come to believe their authorities have betrayed them, those
authorities have no greater enemies. The field of salesmanship is
full of rules-of-thumb. One of them is: it takes eight contacts to
make a sale. Another is: when prospects avoid you it is out of fear,
because they know you can sell them.
In
general, but perhaps not invariably, RWAs flee or avoid 9/11 Truth
information, those in denial repress or disbelieve it.
‘All
day long we unconsciously selectively perceive the world about
us. Man can prevent unpleasant perceptions by varying his attention
and by wishful perceiving or thinking. Unconscious distortion of
perception of external stimuli that arouse unpleasant emotions is
called denial.”
“The
American people know what they saw with their own eyes on September
11, 2001,” says Defense Secretary Gates. And both to Peter Jennings
and to Dan Rather, it was so clear that the World Trade Center was
being demolished by explosives that they blurted out that thought at
the time.
In
the 1950s a psychology professor, Solomon Asch, did some experiments
on college students. He told them that he wanted to test visual
perception, but that was a lie. He had them sit in a classroom with
other students and showed them all some lines, asking which lines
looked like they were the same length, but only one student was being
tested at a time. The others were conspirators along with Professor
Asch, and they deliberately gave wrong answers. The student being
tested was always asked last, after having heard all the others say
that it looked to them as though the wrong lines were the same
length. The experiment was really to find out how many people,
percentagewise, could be made to say that they saw what they didn’t
see, just to go along with the crowd. The answer was: about one
third.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
A
college classroom is a relatively benign environment, at least
compared to the situation that Winston Smith, the protagonist of
1984, found himself in. “ ‘Do you remember,’ he went on,
‘writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two
plus two make four’?” ’ ‘Yes,’ said Winston. O’Brien held
up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and
the four fingers extended. ‘How many fingers am I holding up,
Winston?’ ‘Four.’ ‘And if the Party says that it is not four
but five -- then how many?’ ”
How
much the students believed what they said is probably unknowable, but
the willingness to deny what is in front of your face is certainly
something worthy of being noted. Mr. Lev Grossman says, “Granted,
the Pentagon crash site looks odd in photographs,” but the fact
hardly slows him down. “Loose Change [sic] appeals to the
viewer’s common sense: it tells you to forget the official
explanations and the expert testimony, and trust your eyes and your
brain instead. It implies that the world can be grasped by laymen
without any help or interference from the talking heads.” Or the
other students, or the Party‘s officials and experts, functioning
as designated “authorities.”
This
sort of resistance may be the most deep-seated of all. When someone
brags, “I saw Loose Change. Didn’t convince me,” or goes
through all the material you give them and only comments,
“Interesting,” and then changes the subject, you are dealing with
something other than a psychological trait like Right-Wing
Authoritarianism. You are dealing with a common human failing which
cuts across familiar political divides, and which is just as likely
to be found among progressives as among others. There really are
people who, as Jack Nicholson said, just can’t handle the truth. If
this is seen as discouraging, it shouldn’t be. It shows that the
ability to call a spade a spade is not a progressive monopoly.
In the
Q & A session after his videotaped lecture, 9/11: The Myth and
the Reality, David Ray Griffin says that he has a “theological
friend” who finds the evidence for 9/11 Truth “convincing,” but
nevertheless “refuses” to believe it. The word ‘demonstration’
has roots in the idea of making something visible, quite literally,
to the eyes. If you are dealing with a sighted person who simply
refuses to admit what is in front of their face, perhaps sometimes
the appropriate response is simply a gentle, “Shame on you.”
In
Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two
Notions, Jaakko Hintikka discusses, “…among other things,
Moore’s famous problem of ’saying and disbelieving’: Why is the
sentence ‘p but I do not believe that p’ absurd to
utter?” Following Moore, he points out that the sentence is not
inconsistent with itself. He speaks on page 23 of being
“inconsistent for you.” His response is to add the notion
of “indefensibility” to that of inconsistency. “The general
characteristic of indefensible statements is, therefore, that they
depend for their truth on somebody’s failure (past, present, or
future) to follow the implications of what he knows far enough.”
(p. 32). At the time when Moore and Hintikka addressed such matters
it could reasonably be doubted whether the phenomenon of indefensible
statements like ‘p but I do not believe that p’
was common enough to merit really serious investigation. September
11, 2001 changed that.
“Unconscious
distortion of perception” may manifest as “failure to follow the
implications of what one knows.” Whatever proposition p may
be, p certainly implies p, but it seems that the
psychological phenomenon of denial can prevent following even that
implication.
About
Griffin’s theological friend, one wonders what his theological
opinion is of Sartre’s conception of bad faith.
I
think it is likely to be a waste of time to discuss 9/11 with Mr.
Grossman, or with anyone else who is so desperately frightened by the
facts, or by the possibility of being in a minority, that he cannot
admit what is in front of his face.
Talking
with people in denial, whether they are followers of Alexander
Cockburn or of Rush Limbaugh, should be done with sensitivity to the
individual. It is a cruel thing to take away someone’s blankie.
Parental discretion is advised.
An
interesting phenomenon is the cooperation of RWAs and those in
denial. At this stage of the game, some RWAs need some small
justification for ignoring 9/11 Truth, and those in denial can
provide that by dealing with the evidence for them and pronouncing it
“not credible.” A fine example is represented by the BBC‘s
anti-Truth video, made by Mr. Guy Smith. Listening to Mr. Smith
speaking with Alex Jones about 9/11 Truth, it is clear that Mr. Smith
is in denial, and that he would not have undertaken the project
without encouragement from someone else. The video can now serve,
along with other projects such as the NIST Report and the 9/11
Commission Report itself, as additional justification for avoidance.
RWAs are unlikely to spend time on NIST or the Commission, and the
time it takes to see a video should satisfy their consciences that
they now know all they need to know.
Just
as the ability to face, or admit, unpalatable facts cuts across
left/right dichotomies, the fourth category of resistance is
orthogonal to the first three, since it is an occupational category
rather than a psychological one. The vast majority of Washington
politicians are keenly aware that they could never make as much money
doing anything else, and they are quite interested in hanging onto,
or even upgrading, their six-figure sinecures. It’s not that they
are averse to doing what’s right, it’s that they are inclined
to do what’s right for them. Their real opinions are probably
unknowable, and even if they could be known, would be of no practical
importance. If their salaries were set at $30,000 a year, they would
have an opportunity to demonstrate that they really are as
civic-minded as they say they are. We must make it possible for them,
and help them, to do the right thing.
Politicians
are a subset of those whose opinions are influenced by the way they
make their living. There are plenty of government, defense
contractor, and other employees, who get no direct benefit from 9/11,
but who pay the familiar price of telling conscious lies simply in
order to keep their jobs. Of course, there is a sliding scale of
persuasion: job, freedom, life. Something for everyone.
The
segment of the public we should concentrate on trying to reach is
neither in denial nor fleeing from 9/11 Truth nor primarily
interested in which way the wind is blowing. Rather than saying, like
the authoritarian, “I don’t need to learn about that stuff. I
know everything already,” it simply says, “Hey, just let me live
my life. OK?” The resistance of the RWA and the person in denial is
directed against 9/11 Truth specifically, because of its
unpleasantness. The great mass of resistance we face is simply that
of the great mass of the peoplewhat
Ferejohn calls “most of us”who
are used to having others handle the disagreeable business of
politics for them. Most of them are what used to be called “wage
slaves.” They are the prize we’re after. Joe Six-pack may say,
“It’s not my business” now, but when he finds out about 9/11
Truth, he will make it his business.
II:
Types of Knowledge
Just
as knowing about sources of resistance can be helpful, so can knowing
about different types of knowledge, and the sorts of messages which
are appropriate when trying to create them. The principal distinction
we are concerned with is the distinction between the knowledge that
individuals have and the knowledge that groups, as groups, have.
Since
we are knowledge workers, it behooves us to know something about how
people come to believe what they do believe. Beginning with the study
of individual knowledge, an excellent place to start learning about
that is Keith Devlin‘s book, quoted above.
Devlin,
nothing if not helpful, summarizes his book thus: “…if I had to
distill from our investigations a single slogan that, if followed,
would have the greatest positive impact on information
managementpersonal
or in businessI
would have no difficulty. It’s this: Context matters.” (p.
199).
The
first part of Devlin’s book may strike you as rather abstract and
remote from our concerns, but the second part will show you why the
effort was worth it. As he says, “…there is nothing as practical
as a good theory.” (p. 206).
“…a conversation between two individuals may be regarded as a
process whereby they cooperate to add information to a common pool. …
The name linguists give to the common information pool for a
conversation…is the ‘common ground’ for the conversation.”
(p. 86).
Three
“…key contextsthe
background situations, the common ground, and the focal situationare
regions of what we might call information space. … The purpose of a
meeting [or a contact] can be regarded as the movement of items in
the different background situations into the common ground. Such
movement is caused by the participants jointly visiting that item in
information space. A participant may take information within her own
background and, by making a successful contribution to the
conversation, put it into the common ground. (Making a statement that
the others accept is an example of such a contribution.} Or she may
use her words…to get another participant to take information from
his background and put it into the common ground. (Successfully
asking a question is an example.}” (pp.207f).
“The concepts of background and common ground are analysts’
inventions. In fact, it is misleading to think of the background and
common-ground situations as cleanly delineated regions separated by a
clear border.” (p. 90).
“…going from a two-person conversation to a conversation
involving three or more people is so significant it is probably
misleading to continue to use the same word ‘conversation’.”
(p. 113).
Devlin
provides diagrams of conversations involving both two and three
persons, and shows that for three people, “Already the diagram is
too complex to understand easily, and yet I have left off the focal
situation.” Though activists as such certainly engage in two-person
conversations, their main efforts are directed to much larger
audiences. If the case of N = 3 is barely manageable, what can
be made of the case where N = ~300,000,000?
Clearly,
thoughts of a diagram are out of place here, and yet the ideas
of background and common ground are still reasonably distinct and may
be usable. Social scientists, especially political scientists, are
used to dealing with such “conversations,” and their methods and
approaches may be a propos. “…the common ground consists
of common knowledge…”
The
worst danger the 9/11 Truth Movement faces is that of becoming an
accepted, inert part of the public consciousness, allowed to exist in
its own niche in public discourse in an encapsulated way, just as
other minority opinions are tolerated so long as they threaten no
conceivable imminent change. This is how the truth of the JFK
assassination was contained. Even antiestablishment majority
opinions can safely be tolerated as “open secrets.”
Surveys
conducted by Louis Harris and Associates in 1967, 1975 and 1981
showed that about two-thirds of the people in the United States
thought that the assassination of President Kennedy was part of a
conspiracy, and in 2003 Fox News had Opinion Dynamics Corporation
conduct a poll of 900 registered voters nationwide. With a margin of
error of ±3 percentage points, 66% believed the assassination
was the act of a conspiracy. This is a big enough majority to
override a presidential veto. “Despite a majority believing there
was a cover-up, there is widespread agreement that no additional
inquiries should be done — 74 percent say the government should not
conduct another investigation into the assassination, compared to 20
percent who think it should.”
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,102511,00.html
Everyone
knows that O.J. Simpson is a murderer. And everyone knows that
everyone knows it. Chuck Barris claims to have been a paid murderer
for the CIA. The CIA did not vet his book, nor did he ask them to, as
far as I am aware, nor did he suffer any unwanted consequences of his
confession. In fact he may, like other murderers, have made more
money from the confession than he did from the murders. Why? Simply
because, although the information is as public as anyone could want,
no one, (that is to say, not enough people) believes it, believes it
enough, or realizes that (enough) other people believe it or will
admit to believing it.
What
exactly is an “open secret?”
The
change we seek cannot be brought about by any one person. It must be
accomplished by collective action. We seek to convey information not
just to individuals, but to a large enough group. We seek to instill
not just individual knowledge, but common knowledge.
One
naturally assumes that if a person knows something, they know that
they know it. One is tempted analogously, but falsely, to assume that
if a group knows something, the group knows that it knows it. In
fact, each one of the group may falsely believe that they are the
only ones in the group holding the opinion.
In
1924 Floyd H. Allport broached the idea of what is now called
pluralistic ignorance.
Because
the early date makes his observations so instructive, I shall
quote him at length.
“Psychologically speaking, ‘the public’ means to an individual
an imagined crowd in which (as he believes) certain opinions,
feelings, and overt reactions are universal. What these responses are
imagined to be is determined by the press, by rumor, and by social
projection. Impressed by some bit of public propaganda, the
individual assumes that the impression created is universal and
therefore of vital consequence. Thus the impression of universality
is exploited and commercialized both on the rostrum and in the daily
press. Newspaper columns abound in such statements as “it is the
consensus of opinion here,” “telegrams [of remonstrance or
petition] are pouring in from all sides,” “widespread amazement
was felt,” and the like.
During a recent visit of General Pershing to Boston there appeared a
newspaper article inspired, perhaps, by a discontented faction of
World War veterans. The following quotation will show the attempt of
its author to magnify the personal grievance to one of civic
interest. (Italics are by the present writer.)
The controversy which has been
raging since the refusal of certain YD
leaders to attend the mayor’s banquet at the
this evening [30 out of 300 invited refused to come] has
accentuated interest in the general’s
coming, and Boston is perhaps more concerned
over the character of the reception accorded him than in whatever he
may do or say while here.
The reader who is not on his guard is likely to be seriously misled
by journalism of this character. The allusion to the ‘concern’ of
large numbers produces an unthinking belief in the importance of the
statements made. The artifice, however, seems obvious enough when we
pause to inquire how the reporter could possibly have known what
Boston as a whole was ‘concerned over.’
The same deception lurks in flaring headlines. Our eye is caught by
these ‘scare-heads,’ and we say to ourselves unconsciously: “This
is big news: it is printed large to attract universal attention.
Hence everyone else is looking at it as I am doing. That which
everybody is interested in must be of great importance.” And we
proceed, ready to be duly impressed with what follows. Newspapers
which capitalize the illusion of universality in this way
unfortunately have little to say that is fit to read. But the
unscrupulous and sensation-hunting journalist has scored in securing
attention and in controlling a portion of public opinion through
social projection and the illusion of universality.”
Robert
K. Merton describes the above as speaking of
“…one form of what Floyd H. Allport described as ‘pluralistic
ignorance,’ that is, the pattern in which individual members of a
group assume that they are virtually alone in holding the
social attitudes and expectations they do, all unknowing that others
privately share them. This is a frequently observed condition of a
group which is so organized that mutual observability among its
members is slight. This basic notion of pluralistic ignorance can,
however, be usefully enlarged to take account of a formally similar
but substantively different condition. This is the condition now
under review, in which the members of a role-set do not know that
their expectations of the behavior appropriate for the occupants of a
particular status are different from those held by other
members of the role-set. … .In some instances, the replacing of
pluralistic ignorance by common knowledge serves to make for a
re-definition of what can properly be expected of the
status-occupant.”
Whether
or not this is a generalization of Allport is of relatively little
consequence. Merton seems to have coined the phrase ‘pluralistic
ignorance’ himself. As the expression is used now, a group’s
ignorance of what that group’s opinion really is constitutes
pluralistic ignorance.
No
polls have ever been taken to determine what the public believes
about what most people believe about the Kennedy assassination.
Though
pluralistic ignorance was first introduced via the thought of a
newspaper’s readership, it has tended to be studied in relatively
small groupsneighbors,
for examplewhere
its existence tends to be surprising. If one thinks instead of really
large publicscities,
or nationsits
existence is not so surprising, because no individual can be linked
to or connected with a majority of such a large group except through
some medium; hence, the term “mass media.” If the private owners
of such media wish to shade things to convey a false impression,
nothing prevents them. They are not under oath, and apart from that
there is no law against lying. They take pains to create the
impression that they are subject to some sort of official sanction
for dishonesty, and like to tell us how “trusted” they are, but
they never hint that perhaps they will be sanctioned for telling the
truth. They operate on a for-profit basis. If most of the time they
wish to convey the impression that, say, the opinion that there was a
Kennedy conspiracy is the opinion of a disreputable minority, they
certainly can. (And they certainly do.) As this example illustrates,
pluralistic ignorance is fairly easy for the media to create, and it
is a very valuable tool.
It is
valuable because of what Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann dubbed “the
spiral of silence” in her 1984 book of that name. The
spiral of silence describes how the perception of public opinion
influences the willingness of individuals to express their own
opinions, when they believe those opinions are a minority view.
According to her, people have a sort of “sense” of what majority
opinion is, and fear being isolated. The perception of public opinion
thus acts as a sort of control on the expression of opinion. Whether
such a “sense” explains anything not explicable through the
existence of the mass media is debatable, but because the effect is
real whatever causes it, control over perception of what the majority
opinion is, is obviously a powerful weapon in the information war.
Had the public been aware that most people were with them in
thinking as they did, would they have been so willing to let the
Kennedy murderers get away with it?
http://www.12manage.com/methods_noelle-neumann_spiral_of_silence.html
What
all this tells us is that it is not enough to contact and convince
people. We must interest the politically uninterested, if only
briefly, we must do it without the mass media, at least initially,
and we must let everyone know that everyone else knows.
All
through the Vietnam War, the mass media told us that although those
grisly images might seem discouraging, there was light at the end of
the tunnel, and the U.S. was “winning.” However, there are limits
even to spin, and when the U.S. withdrew the media could not hide
that fact. It will be interesting to see how they spin their own
complicity in deception when the worms finally turn.
The
opposite of pluralistic ignorance is the idiomatically-misnamed
notion of common knowledge (it is sometimes, and better, called
mutual knowledge, but ‘common knowledge‘ has become entrenched).
If something is common knowledge in the relevant sense, then not only
does everyone know it, but everyone knows that everyone knows it, and
everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it, etc.
This characterization leaves many important questions unsettled. Must
the individuals actually realize that they know that they know… an
infinite number of times, or is it enough to know something which
entails that they know that they know…; or that they know that they
know something which entails that they know that they know…? Must
the knowing all take place at the same time? “Evidence suggests
that knowledge of other people’s knowledge takes longer to form
than knowledge.” Must each individual know each other individual,
or can you know that everyone knows without knowing everyone? What
about “almost everyone?” What if we substitute belief for
knowledge? Answering all these questions is not necessary for our
purpose here; i.e., we need not define common knowledge as
precisely as would be appropriate on a different occasion. We may
take it here to be simply the absence of pluralistic ignorance.
In his
article on “Common Knowledge” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, Peter Vanderschraaf says, “The
analysis and applications of…multi-agent knowledge concepts has
become a lively field of research,”
http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query+Common+Knowledge
Under
the name “common knowledge,” the subject is usually given a more
or less mathematical treatment, and appears in more or less
mathematical contexts, but it has broad literary roots in R.D. Laing
and David Cooper, Pirandello, and even, according to Laing and
Russell Jacoby, in Feuerbach.
A
notion of common knowledge is common to the study both of multi-agent
knowledge and of individual knowledge. If A knows that B knows
that A knows…that p, that is individual knowledge that A
has. It is also individual knowledge that B has. It just so happens
that the content of this individual knowledge entails that more than
one individual has it.
It
seems appropriate to think of common knowledge as a dimension, or a
direction in which one can travel. Some notion of common knowledge
might serve as an “explication” of Dr. John McMurtry’s
conception (in 9/11
and American Empire, Vol. I: Intellectuals Speak Out)
of a “group-mind.” The group-mind’s self-awareness
will consist of common knowledge among the minds that compose it. The
Marxian notion of “class consciousness” suggests itself here.
Observe
the difference between between simply disseminating knowledge as
widely as possible, and making it common knowledge.
Elections
are recently over. By far most political signs I saw simply had a
candidate’s name on them, or such a message as “Vote for Joe.”
What reasons did they give me to vote for Joe? None. Nada. Zip.
Zilch. They made no risky claims for Joe which his rivals could
conceivably show to be false, because they didn’t say anything at
all about him. In fact, I can’t remember any that did. Isn’t this
sort of advertising nonsensical? It’s not disseminating anything
about Joe beyond the bare fact that he’s running, and that his name
is Joe. Or is it? How many such signs I see gives me an idea of how
much money his campaign has. That may persuade others to think that
if he has so very much money, there must be a lot of people
supporting him. It is at least not ludicrous, not
out-of-the-question, for Joe to hold the office. He is a “credible”
candidate. When money talks, what does it say? Very little, in fact,
but what little it does say becomes, and is intended to become,
common knowledge.
Contrast
this situation with a reasoned presentation of the case for Joe’s
being a better holder of the office than the other candidates. The
more reasons presented, the more the case can be disputed by denying
the factuality of those reasons. The more reasons presented, the more
voluminous, specific and detailed the information becomes; and the
more voluminous, specific and detailed the information becomes the
less likely it is all to become common knowledge. Instead, if the
various claims are disputed, what becomes common knowledge is the
putative fact that Joe’s qualifications are controversial, i.e.,
subject to being controverted.
We
must distinguish between simply spreading knowledge and making
something common knowledge, simply because of the tension, the
trade-off, between them. Michael Suk-Young Chwe marks the distinction
by means of the terminology of content vs. publicity.
There
is a limit to how much content can become common knowledge, first,
because there is a limit on individual knowledge. One can’t be a
doctor and a lawyer and a mathematician, and a
philosopher, and a physicist, and a mechanical
engineer, and a theologian, and a pilot, and
have, as Alex Jones puts it, a Master’s in 9/11.
But
the limitations on common knowledge are much more severe than on
individuals’ knowledge simply because the more recently acquired or
specific a piece of knowledge is, the more doubtful it becomes that
it is common knowledge, or ever can become common knowledge. Common
knowledge exists in the social structures of primates and in the
hunting parties of carnivores, and needless to say, what is
common knowledge in these cases isn‘t, by human standards, terribly
complex.
“…we
can assume that because of the division of labor role-specific
knowledge will grow at a faster rate than generally relevant and
accessible knowledge.”
Even
in a society composed of people each of whom had all the above
qualifications, there would be plenty of room for individuals’
doubts about other individuals’ knowledge. But having more
content more widely disseminated results in somewhat more
specific common knowledge. A more-highly-educated population will
have more-specific common knowledge.
Does
anyone think that the purpose of having a 9/11 Truther interviewed by
some broadcasting Brownshirt is the dissemination of content? Of
course not. The idea is rather to spread the simple impression that
it’s open season on such heretics and that they are
publicly-designated targets.
There
is no question of content being “better” than publicity, or
vice versa. In different situations and for different audiences,
one is more appropriate, the other less so. Different strokes for
different folks. Rather than the Movement as a whole leaning toward
one direction or the other; we should think full-spectrum dominance.
There is room for everyone’s contribution. That said, I think we
would agree that up to now more has been done on content, on
technical research, than on publicity, perhaps under the naive
assumption that truth is bound to make itself known.
The
Truth Movement is unlike the Peace Movement, the Civil Rights
Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, the Evironmental Movement, the
Feminist Movement, and every other Movement I can think of in that it
is much more content-based than publicity-based. Everyone knows that
war is bad, but some people feel it is now necessary. The Peace
Movement has nothing new to actually tell them, other than, “WE
feel it’s NOT necessary.” Other Movements all carry with them
some relatively new information, but the 9/11 Truth Movement consists
almost entirely of new information, information that will change
people’s behavior when they acquire it, and this fact tends to make
us concentrate on developing content, sometimes at the expense of
publicity.
“Something
will happen when enough of us know,” concludes that masterpiece
video, 911 Mysteries: Part One. This is almost right. Of
course, one can always take it to be true by definition: if nothing
happens, that’s not enough of us. But what is important is not
only that enough of us know, but that we are aware that we know, and
that we are aware that there are enough of us; that we are, in a way,
“on the same page,” or “together.”
It
seems that RWAs will be more affected by individual knowledge; those
in denial, whether on the Left or Right, will be more affected by
common knowledge. If it seems you are dealing with someone amenable
to reason, use content; the specific knowledge that constitutes our
background knowledge as Truthers. If you are dealing with someone in
denial, only an increase in society’s knowledge of 9/11 Truth will
move them toward more comfort in admitting the obvious. Do not
address them as individuals. They are reachable not through content,
but through publicity.
Assuming
therefore that we are addressing people not in denial, we must reckon
with the problem of time. We must present something, a piece of
content, that is graspable quickly enough to capture someone’s
interest, to convince them, not of 9/11 Truth, but that the subject
of 9/11 Truth is worth looking into. We must present the most
concentrated and hard-to-argue-with smoking gun (or guns) possible.
Continuing
in terms of Devlin‘s “information space,” if we think of
multi-agent “common knowledge” as corresponding to the familiar
four-dimensional world of daily life, individual knowledge- or
belief-concepts correspond to the extra “hidden” or
“compactified” dimensions of twenty-first century physics. Which
is more important or “real” depends on your interests. The common
pool of information created in a two-person conversation is through
common knowledge located in both heads; in a many-person
conversation, or interaction, the “group-mind” created is located
in each of them.
The
“background” knowledge of the 9/11 Truth Movement is simply what
we know that the public doesn’t. It is what we are trying to put
into the common ground. If we think of “the public” as our
conversational partner, what is that partner putting into the common
ground out of its background? Who are, or what is, the public? Who
should we take
as being the public?
It
makes a big difference whether we think of that partner as speaking
to us through the mass media or not, and it makes a big difference
whether we think of the common ground as simply the content of those
mass media, as there is a tendency to do. That tendency should be
resisted.
Beside
verbally putting facts into the common ground, Devlin discloses that
you can also physically put artifacts into it.
“One common and potentially effective strategy is to make regular
notes on a whiteboard or a display pad as the meeting proceeds. …
An analyst would say that the whiteboard is an example of a common
artifact. Common artifacts provide information in such a way that
it readily becomes common knowledge to everybody having simultaneous
access to it. The whiteboard provides common knowledge because it is
a public display, and thus everyone in the room can see one another
looking at the board.
The use of a whiteboard is quite different from everyone in the room
taking their own notes. You and I may see each other taking notes,
but as the meeting proceeds, I cannot be sure what notes you have
taken and you won’t know what I have written. So, even though we
may have taken the same notes, the information in our notes is not
automatically common knowledgethat
is, writing information in our individual notebooks does not make it
common knowledge, as happens when that information is written on a
whiteboard. This is the key distinction between a common artifact and
a private source of information.”
As far
as concerns our search for the most concentrated and
hard-to-argue-with smoking gun possible, this is good news. What sort
of artifact would be especially relevant to 9/11 Truth? To answer
that question let us look at another book, this one by Fred I.
Dretske, viz., Knowledge and the Flow of Information,
(Cambridge, MA, 1982). He says:
“…consider the difference between a picture and a statement.
Suppose a cup has coffee in it, and we want to communicate this piece
of information. If I simply tell you, ’The cup has coffee in
it,’ this (acoustic) signal carries the information that the cup
has coffee in it in digital form. No more specific information is
supplied about the cup (or the coffee) than that there is some coffee
in the cup. You are not told how much coffee there is in the
cup, how large the cup is, how dark the coffee is, what the
shape and orientation of the cup are, and so on. If, on the other
hand, I photograph the scene and show you the picture, the
information that the cup has coffee in it is conveyed in analog form.
The picture tells you that there is some coffee in the cup by telling
you, roughly, how much coffee is in the cup, the shape, size, and
color of the cup, and so on.
I can say that A and B are of different size without saying how much
they differ in size or which is larger, but I cannot picture A and B
as being of different size without picturing one of them as larger
and indicating, roughly, how much larger it is. …
To say that a picture is worth a thousand words is merely to
acknowledge that, for most pictures at least, the sentence needed to
express all the information contained in the picture would have to be
very complex indeed. Most pictures have a wealth of detail, and a
degree of specificity, that makes it all but impossible to provide
even an approximate linguistic rendition of the information
the picture carries in digital form.”
How
many time-wasting arguments about what happened to the Towers would
be obviated if they were conducted with constant reference to a
picture? Why do you think the media avoid pictures so assiduously? We
need to put as many pictures before the public’s eyes as possible,
accompanied by a small amount of text to lead the viewer as quickly
as possible to the relevant features. In that way we address both the
right and left hemispheres.
We
also need to take account of Lakoff’s thinking on reframing. A tiny
word can make a massive difference. Do not accept the description of
the Towers as “falling down.” They FELL APART (according to the
Administration). We don’t have “theories.” Some
individuals in the Movement have “theories.” What we
have are pictures.
The
fact that there are people, and more than a few of them, who are
willing to deny that they see what they do see has been used to frame
discussion of 9/11 Truth as “controversial,” when in fact it is
no such thing. Lakoff points out that it is a mistake for
progressives to concede to their opponents such framing as the phrase
“tax relief.” I believe it is just as much a mistake for Truthers
to concede that 9/11 Truth is controversial. The fact that someone
denies that 2+2=4 does not make arithmetic a controversial subject,
but the reputation of being “controversial” is used to deter
people from looking into 9/11 Truth, by making them think, as Chomsky
thinks, that the result will not be worth the effort.
We
need to address rational others in something like the following
terms:
When
something falls, it falls in one direction. When something explodes,
it explodes in all directions. Which did the Towers do? When
something falls, it falls down, not up and not sideways. [Look at
these pictures.] When an object collapses, it breaks into two or a
few pieces. It does not break everywhere. The Towers were not made of
sand, they were made of steel and concrete, and yet in a matter of
seconds they dissolved from the top down like sand castles. Nothing
“collapses” to dust. Steel doesn’t break, it bends; but it can
be cut by oxyacetylene torches and the cutting charges used in
controlled demolitions. Since innumerable sections of steel columns
in the Towers were found in clean-edged pieces, were they instantly
cut by oxyacetylene torches or by explosives? What sent them flying
in all directions? Does a building that is simply falling down
normally produce shrapnel? When a building falls on a human body,
that body is crushed where it is. It is not turned to fragments of
bone, which are then found on the roofs of other buildings. All
these things are not controversial; they’re obvious. How do you
knock down three buildings with two airplanes? What mental contortion
will you not attempt, and what intellectual crucifixion will you not
submit to, in order to have your dinner undisturbed?
Now
let’s proceed to multi-agent information, and in particular to
common knowledge. What Devlin’s book is to individual information,
Michael Chwe’s book, Rational
Ritual: Culture, Coordination and Common Knowledge, (Princeton,
2001) is
to multi-agent information (that is to say, indispensable). Its
bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. Chwe’s book can
be described thus: “game theory finds culture.” (p. 99). Though
apparently a strictly academic work, it is full of practical
information for activists.
Chwe
says: “The best common knowledge generator in the United States is
the Super Bowl…” I don’t think there ever will be a 9/11 Truth
advertisement displayed during that event, so let’s see what else
he’s got. He notes that in the French Revolution much use was made
of “festivals,…and even planting liberty trees and wearing
revolutionary colors.” As pictures are powerful tools in spreading
individual knowledge, or content, gear and ritual (i.e.,
spectacle) are powerful in propagating common knowledge, or
publicity. The Revolutionary tricolour echoes in the recent Color
Revolutions of Central
and Eastern
Europe, and Central
Asia. We should try to “be the media” by using
unmistakable logos wherever possible, and, in general, being as
visible as possible. In Evgeny Zamiatin’s We, the
inspiration for Orwell’s 1984, the revolutionaries
recruited and struggled simply by making their name, the Mephi, as
widely seen as possible. We should emphasize our common opposition to
the lie, not our individually incompatible versions of the truth.
Appendix:
On Knowledge by Consensus
“You
are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You
would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.
You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the
disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality
is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also
believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude
yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that
everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston,
that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and
nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes,
and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which
is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth,
is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through
the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn,
Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will.
You must humble yourself before you can become sane.”
He
paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had been saying
to sink in.
“Do
you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is
the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?”
“Yes,”
said Winston.
O’Brien
held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb
hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How
many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And
if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?”
“Four.”
The
word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to
fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The
air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by
clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the
four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the
pain was only slightly eased.
“How
many fingers, Winston?”
“Four.”
The
needle went up to sixty.
“How
many fingers, Winston?”
“Four!
Four! What else can I say? Four!”
The
needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy,
stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood
up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to
vibrate, but unmistakably four.
“How
many fingers, Winston?”
“Four!
Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”
“How
many fingers, Winston?”
“Five!
Five! Five!”
“No,
Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are
four. How many fingers, please?”
“Four!
Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!”
Abruptly
he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had
perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held
his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking
uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling
down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby,
curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the
feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something
that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was
O’Brien who would save him from it.
“You
are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How
can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in
front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes,
Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three.
Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is
not easy to become sane.”
October 17, 2004
Megalomania in the White House
Posted by Adam Young
at October 17, 2004 02:53 PM
Ron Suskind on a
meeting with a Bush aide in 2002:
In the
summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the
White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director,
Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He
expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me
something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I
now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The
aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based
community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded
and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.
He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works
anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left
to just study what we do.''
http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/006267.html
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Activists as Knowledge Workers9.doc
