What’s normal now (5)…Turning science into ignorance and “illegals” into offense

Torrey Orton

Feb.3, 2014

 

Blurring boundaries with intent

I’m reading for the first time a book called Agnotology – The making and unmaking of ignorance (2009) which is a collection of reflections on how ignorance is the boundary of knowledge. It includes some treatment of how the boundaries of ignorance are maintained by the satisfactions of current knowledges. Esoteric? Only until I read the chapter on how in the early 1950’s in the US Big Tobacco, with the active collusion of PR major Hill Knowlton, set about defeating good science and pursued it successfully for 60 years to this date. A recent stage in debasing the science of smoking-induced cancer is presenting the industry as “responsible manufacturers of a risky product”. A satisfactory knowledge is profit producing. There are some others like self-esteem enhancing and identity supporting ones.

The flow on from this PR learning process, driven by the need to protect pre-existing knowledge and interests from threatening truths, can be seen in the debasing of science in the climate wars. If the government can call victimising of refugees a “war” and struggles about class (income imbalance) and consciousness (history) wars, then climate war is a no brainer. “War” is a condition which removes the right to any other conditions, the condition which smooths all kinds of legal-ethical-conceptual tangles. ‘War’ has history as a promotional threat of preference in the US – see the 1960’s war on poverty and the 1980’s war on drugs (the latter lead by a “drug czar”) for historical instances. Only the war on poverty made some headway, while the war on drugs amplified the depth and spread of drugs into a multi-national crisis.

A low grade but high impact variation on this theme is the “illegal boat people” meme which has been imposed / plastered on the ignorant public with special energy since the Howard government’s SEIV-X campaign at the turn of the election in October, 2001.

Demonising sticks, mud clings and the past catches up with you

This piece of clearly intentional deception has created a mud which sticks to refugees these days, to the tune of 60% of our citizenry agreeing “illegals” are not dealt with harshly enough by the government of this day…as if they were some kind of bikie gang or alcohol-fuelled one-punch mongrels who should be punished into submission to normal behaviour routines…a policy unlikely to succeed as others have noted in those spheres. Repetition of “illegal” eventually produced an unquestioned label in the minds of the unaffected public – a label for something to be avoided, a reverse brand, so to speak as we can now see building up with the war on “illegal bikie gangs” (Campbell Newman at the borders of Queensland turning back the bikies??)!!

The “illegal” boat people meme may also give the offense-can-only- be-taken crowd (summarised in ON OFFENCE - THE POLITICS OF INDIGNATION by Richard King; Scribe, 2013) something to think about. If you give offense to the defenceless by berating, debasing, and denying their humanity and that adds to their defencelessness, have you given offense which they could just not take by choice? I suspect so. Work on anger and male rage / violence would suggest otherwise, too.

An observation about how long term vilification effects shared truth

It will take years to recover the moral ground that has been eroded by these years of inhumanity to the defenceless. Much the same can be expected for the recovery from years of deriding the only form of empirical knowledge we can have agreed confidence in – natural science. Of course, the recovery may not happen and the defenceless parts of the world which have been injured may slide slowly out of sight, their after images lingering on the wings of the latest political spins. Do I hear ‘responsible providers of end of life services’ for instance, which are offered by the privatised health and incarceration industries which manage our prisons and refugee holding pens now (Serco, etc.)?

 

 

Perceptions and truth(s)

Perceptions and truth(s)
Torrey Orton
Sept. 23, 2010


I am struck these days by the various ways we can be deceived in our grasp of the world, and ourselves. This is apart from the consciously deceptive intent of our public world(s) and the conscious intent to create perceptions which our various artists demonstrate for us. There is also the unconscious distortion of our perceptions which arises from our premonitions of them in the form of 'previews' in the media, the reports of others about them, the interactions between the two and so on.

 For instance of the later, there was the Millau Viaduc in my mind from quite a lot of exposures at a distance, among them the BBC series of great modern constructions, a web page full of site clips and photos, some local (regional French) tourist encouragements – all contributors to a sense I knew what I was going to see. Almost all were taken from the level of the bridge or above. Our approach to the reality was from the level of the river Tarn 250 meters below the road way. Grand enough at that, but not the hanging in air glory that the previews supported. I was not stunned, shocked, shaken, uplifted….but thought I should have been, which added to the letdown. It did not occur to me that 90 minutes spent beforehand in the Roquefort cheese caverns 25 Ks down the road might have constrained my expectations to things just in front of me.

The reverse of this was my first sight of The Nightwatch through a small door on an oblique angle to the picture in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam 40 years ago… a view which amplified the commanding stature of the work, and which in turn was intensified by its unconscious comparison with two existing images in my mind: (1) that of the picture from an art history slide show screened in a format close to that of the real thing and (2) its micro version in the text book of the same course. Then I felt visually completed, fulfilled in an expectation I did not know I had until reality rewarded it with fact.Yet another access to the perils of perception is the very common experience of seeing something which at a certain moment looks like something it certainly is not. The rooster on the road is a web-honoured example of this, including its own self-test against variable perceptions.

Extending the avian theme, I saw a rosella of unlikely hues on the ground overlooking the Loddon River at Glen Lyon, Vic. a few days ago. This bird turned out to be a lichen infested rock declining in similarity to my first impression with every step closer to it. My focus of course was much more intent than the first glance which created the perception. My search for continuing likenesses to support that first glance moved with the insistence that self- justification demands. And, too, it was a very unlikely spot to find a solo rosella in the open, as my wife implicitly noted by immediately debunking my perception. I gave in two steps later, losing in the doing a hope that I had seen something normal in a very unusual way. Trouble is, it was wholly unusual and firmly no way. My point here, in case I lose it in short term memory glitches, is that it is very easy to see what we want / need where it is not. For my painter friends this is a good thing, for their work is to create what we can't see in what is there. Even a gathering of others may work against the clarification of the imagined when too much group membership is at stake in a threatened group perception. The research and experience on this tally fully for once.

So what is the effect of a world in which two kinds of realities are confused by misrepresentation? First the intimate is made public and then the public is made banal. Public intimacy is the content of "reality" TV …public banality is the censoring of human (and animal these days) realities like death, injury and other matters attracting notices of too dangerous to be seen without forewarning. Listen to police reporting road trauma, family violence, drunk violence, etc. Intention is the source of this misrepresentation – the intention to obscure our world and our worlds from each other. Among The effects are an untraceable paranoia, low grade fears that we are being got at…but by who? Obsessive vigilance sets in, with an air of preparation for battles. We know from the "fog of war" that persistent uncertainty in a context of potential threat is destabilising to selves and groups. The needs which are assailed by this dynamic are those for intimacy (love, care, etc.), affiliation (belonging, membership) and their facilitating ones (appreciation, acknowledgment, etc,).

The question is: is the misrepresentation intentional or consequential, or some of both? It really does not matter, except that apparently unintentional misrepresentation (deception) is an aggravated assault because it is unaccountable. The consequence is a sense of being either the authors of our own paranoia, or, as can be seen in exaggerated forms in cults and conspiracy theories (both which are massively facilitated by the Web), victims of veiled dangers. This effect is prominently on display in the US in the phantasies about Obama's origins believed by 20+% of the population, paralleled by the beliefs about alien visitors kept secret by the government, and the origin of 9/11 in the CIA, etc. Not surprising the Tea Party plays so well, hatched in a fog which we '60ers associate with another kind of tea.And, they tend to multiply and mutually reinforce. They are also untouchable by empirical truth, having emotional truths (the threats) already occupying the relevant brainspace.

 Woe are we, for these are the marginals. Woe are they because their leaders pre(a)y on and feed their paranoias. Under present conditions, the difference
between 'we' and 'they' becomes daily thinner.

Learning to act right (5)…. Learning to lie – the borderlands

Learning to act right (5)…. Learning to lie – the borderlands
Torrey Orton
March 19, 2010


For patients / clients of health services a main focus of accountability is on the practitioner. The health system is a vague backdrop, encountered in private health and Medicare rebates, bulk-billing, ER waiting times and GP clinic receptionists. The practitioner often has little or no control over the system for which they are accountable to the clients / patients.


In my consultant therapist life I am often accountable for things I'm not responsible for. Accountable and responsible are different facets of the same events. More importantly, certain situations embroil me in minor unethicalities, along with most of my colleagues in similar roles, but perhaps not those fully employed in mandated public sector service provision.


For instance, I have to express my concern, sorrow, and disappointment with my (our) performance to a client. A typical event is a mistake in our systems which leads to a therapy appointment not being met. My engagement with a client couple about our failure was done by phone, so the exposure of my apology behaviour competence was high (higher still is SMS and email). In the instance in mind, my expressed concern for client lost time, inconvenience and possible intensified symptoms was appropriate and adequate, but not successful in retaining the client couple. One of them was more forgiving than the other, even after additional efforts by other staff to make up for the error.


Practicing unethical behaviour

 My particular interest here is that I was practicing my potentially unethical (lying, to a degree, though one of my readers questioned using this term in such circumstances*) behaviour and had no choice about doing so. I am in danger of increasing my capacity for unethical behaviour, whenever I practice (and so improve) my competence at it. Probably that capacity is already fairly well developed or I could not be a successful adult - or have survived growing up with the limited amount of punishment I actually received (which implies, you can see, the things I did that were unethical in that time which I successfully concealed!).


The ability to dissimulate or deceive is an important survival skill and attitude for most of the injured people I see in therapy, too. They learn to conceal their feelings and associated facts. And here come denial and repression steaming around the corner as tools of personal functionality which we also learn and need. And where do we learn this? At home, of course. One of our parents' most important tasks is to teach us self-defence. The modelling is richly available in their own inconsistencies and self-deceptions.


On the other hand, it is difficult to teach ordinary people (call centre staff for instance) to produce these kinds of lies – especially the pro-forma apology– with anything like conviction. They try to make up for the authenticity shortage with repetition, volume, and false friendliness. You can read complaints of their credibility failures regularly in letters pages and blogs. The learners are usually insufficiently motivated for seriously competent deception, while pro-forma expression is easily detectable as such (see T. Woods and company here.)


So, I guess I'm making a case here for ethical unethicality under some circumstances - the ones in which there is danger of slipping over into the simply unethical! And it is implicit that I'm as susceptible to a slip as anyone, maybe more for as yet unexamined reasons of past slippages in my ethical decisionmaking.

* He suggested it was overkill and that lying implied a definite conscious deception. His perception led me to see how these matters overlap easily. Some deception and some withholding of facts are essential to the building and maintenance of a solid self and from that perspective cannot be seen as lying in the consciously deceptive or misleading sense we associate with unethical behaviour. But, the capacity for keeping our own counsel is also the one which allows us to deceive consciously – which, like most competent functions, must be relatively seamless and natural in its performance or the deception fails. That people can get really good at deception and lying is attested by the endless search for reliable lie detectors and the recurrent failure to find one.

Rectifications (21) – Nefarious NAB – “Sign up to fight unfair banking”!!

Rectifications (21) – Nefarious NAB – "Sign up to fight unfair banking"!!
Torrey Orton– February 16, 2010

"Sign up to fight unfair banking"!!

… sighted on Burnley train platform, 11 Feb '10

I shouldn't have been but I was astounded by the above. Then I was mildly outraged that the bank which always takes and never gives but for a take elsewhere in the shadows at least the size of the give...the people with no people to talk to, the people who you can't even get their computer generated customer service voices without myriad seldom used numbers…all the garbage of postmodern productivity..the people I know I cannot escape by going to the competitors who also use the same spin to gain slivers of edge on each other…Arrgh! By writing this my mildness is overtaken with teeth gritting anger.


This is not dog-whistle. It's Orwellian distortion of natural orders.


"When you sign up for our everyday account there are no monthly account fees ever with no strings attached. It's just one of the ways we give our customers more." (NAB website) Plus you get NAB Visa Debit Card (and in four colours!!) at no extra cost and access to expanded range of ATMs. So where is the money made in this? In the transactions, of course. Do they say that in the adverts? No.


So, who are these banalitists ? Who pays for and who executes, apparently shamelessly (since the right to speak is on their side legally – but not morally!), the spinning of the bank's reputation for sneaky, self-interested, obscure profit-making by turning it on its head to suggest the bank is an institution committed to social and personal justice??


And when will they release the report(s) which led them to make this move towards social justice? Will these reports show that they have been scamming us in various ways for days, weeks, months, years, decades (choose your preferred standard )? Will they specify the means of scamming and the profits made from them? Will they show that the profit increments achieved by scamming are a slight proportion of total profits? No, none of these will occur because it's all commercial in confidence of course. And, if they did, their shareholders of institutional size will have a rather shady look, too. Especially the Board level ones.


Maybe it's just a counter-offensive to Westpac's bringing back the branch managers ploy? Who's the greater fake customer servicer? Anyway, they have no shame about substantive things like their dependence on public support (even our wonderfully regulated banks benefitted from such considerations last year). This isn't mentioned here as elsewhere in the international community of finance. Where the king is naked and no one sees, there's little lost by disregarding the facts.


And so, good night.

The Rectifications…of names and things (1) – ‘Send a message…’
Torrey Orton
Feb. 20, 2009
One tool for obscuring reality is inappropriate or incorrect generalisations. Another is incorrect conceptualising of the world. Contemporary spinspeak is alive with them both. Following the suggestion of Confucius, I will undertake some rectification of names in our times, though perhaps without the same finesse of distinction and definition. However, my aim is to show the way to the concrete, to palpable truths, by way of agreed significations for our signs. This requires demystification and deconstruction. The first of these follows.

Instrumental relationships (see my 2 blogs on “Dances with Difference” for details of relationship types), increasingly dominate civic processes and discourses, and uproot /swamp the intimate ones. One way this is repeatedly imposed on us is this: the prominence of expressions like ‘send a message’ or ‘the message is…’ in contexts where the audience or subject of the message is not present (and often not discoverable in any concrete sense). This is a source of endless wonder – almost an acknowledgement that no communication can occur. The presumed audience is usually the ‘community’, or occasionally a stereotypical sub-community within the ‘community’ – e.g., bikers, bankers, bogans, beachbums, barbies, ….

We know that communication is not a unidirectional encoding-packaging-sending-unpackaging-decoding process of the sender –receiver type typical of communication training. The main reason this construct fails (the sender-receiver one) is that the ‘message’, whatever it is, is truly in the eye of the beholder in the first place and so cannot be seriously claimed to have been sent until ‘reception’ is proven by a ‘receiver’ response – which is mostly undoable in the contexts where ‘send a message’ is the name for the act of attempted communication.

The claim a message is sent implies it must be heard and so settles the need of senders to fulfil their perception of their obligations to others (and implicitly to themselves). Yet, ‘send a message’ is often a plea for an effect which cannot be attained by sending alone. Maybe the speaker knows it. The intended effect therefore is the appearance of caring about the espoused ‘message’. In Australia, examples of this abound in matters like: reducing binge drinking, athletic drug taking, excess non-evidence-based executive remuneration, and on and on. And we haven’t even looked at really serious stuff like climate, GFC, fluids. Foods..… the stuff of question time where it often seems the messages are mostly to themselves, and select audiences in the political apparatus (persons and organisations – the various players).

Where the message is for a clear audience, its intent is often to show that they needn’t worry; they are understood, etc. These tend to be marginal groupings of various sorts with high marginal political potential. (See forthcoming blog called “Political Default” for disproportionate influence achieved by marginal groups). Somebody’s whistling. While we are at it, we should notice that ‘stay on message’ is the supporting cast for the main acting of sending one. Its virtue is persistence in the face of increasingly insurmountable odds that no one’s listening - except other message issuers.