I'd like to touch on this stuff more in depth at another time, but for now, a couple of thoughts.
Part of the management of civilized society consists of the
skilled shaping and manipulation of the various public opinions. There is a
paranoid vision that such manipulative propaganda is a sort of malevolent and
targeted project of brainwashing, whereas the reality of the phenomenon is
closer to that of competing factions and interests locked in constant struggle
to move the needle on public opinion and cultural benchmark, and ideally, the material Titanic is perhaps pushed a little further in the desired direction of whatever dominant faction has the reigns in hand.
Nevertheless, a softer form of the paranoid vision holds
true: we’ve long since discovered through the dark arts of marketing and PR - and then deeper into more clandestine techniques and powers - that the collective and individual emotional base can be switched and persuaded in various directions
with imagery and the manipulation of chains of symbols which elicit the desired
response, much like one programs a computer through provisional symbolic
languages, which set various lower operations in motion - say through electrical patterns and the operations of machinery - to achieve a variety of
desired outcomes.
There is an underlying collective architecture that can be appealed to
and then directed in a certain way, though of course the perpetual manipulation
of this architecture eventually produces distortions that can build on each
other, and even crash against other social, economic, and political tensions.
This becomes even more troubling when the soft manipulation
of public opinion is required to steer a volatile body politic through a
serious of escalating crises. The composition and behavior of the body itself,
which grows increasingly violent and unstable as its own entity, becomes part
of the crisis itself.
Today the violent flipping of the “on/off” or “good/bad”
binary is a serious problem in and of itself, which produces a corresponding
fear of the flip and an attendant attempt to further mitigate through finer and
more refined propaganda, which does eventually backfire, destroying trust, increasing
paranoia, and producing more positive feedback and pushing the entire dialectic
to greater extremes.
Witness the constant churning of competing mutually exclusive points of opinion in the public space, and the fumbled attempts to navigate this churn with mealy-mouthed political pronouncements, half-truths, and dodges to attempt to construct and reconstruct a navigating image that is often at odds with the turbulent reality on the ground.
One good example to point to in this respect is the
vaccination debacle. In an ideal scenario, one could imagine a healthy and
secure populace more than willing to weigh out the risks and benefits, clearly
laid before them, and through measured reflection, choose the course of action
best for themselves and the greater community. Instead, one expects hostility
and through motivated reasoning pitches the vaccine as the way and minimizes
any associated risks, thus betraying trust and further arousing suspicion when problems occur, no
matter if the vaccine is a reasonable and effective measure to take anyway.
Instability increases, and the fear grows, and the need for
control grows with it, thus alienating and provoking the living field one is
attempting to control. Rinse and repeat. There are plenty of possible implications and elaborations on this phenomena, which I'd like to get to at another time.
