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.)?

 

 

Rectifications (15) – Value add1…and value for money.

Rectifications (15) – Value add¹…and value for money.

Torrey Orton²– September 9, 2009

I remember the first time I heard this expression, rather than reading it. About 8 years ago I was sitting in a meeting of negotiation specialists. The expression is among the most self-announcing spin of them all. It proposes that the speaker will add something to the value you should normally expect of him/her, which they have been withholding from you all the time of your previous relating about whatever they offer as value to you! Consequently, it has the ring of a car salesman looking for a purchase from a naïf of country origin…second class second-hand car sales at that. As if the 'add' would make up for the missing value in the original.

I think this was my first conscious awareness of the pervasive encroachment of spinspeak on ordinary discourse. The speaker in question was a relatively new member of a professional development network. I was an elder member of that group. While I'd heard the expression before in print I'd never heard a real person say it in pursuit of a real agenda. In this case, it was a marketing natter among fellow travellers. The first shock was that the speaker in question was a thoroughly decent guy with an eye for the straight spoken and an ear for irony. How could someone speak such trash ('value add') and be sensible? It was my first exposure to the creep of cultural change upon us.

My second shock was that people actually used this language as if it referred to realities. It does, of course! Confected ones, which make things appear to be present which were always present but not visible (in their product / service offer). And there were some additions made which might be considered iterations or improvements but now could be introduced with a better frame – the value add. This is conceptualisation of the 'make a difference' genre. They depend on creating an assumption – namely, that there is now something which there wasn't before; we have advanced, moved forward, made progress and …They have that wonderful mixture of abstract and concrete which attracts attention and deflects examination.

Spread of linguistic innovation

How does this come to be the case? How do linguistic (and maybe other) innovations spread once they have arisen? It is probably a process as close to the behaviourist learning fantasy as is to be found. Repetition is key. So, early and repeat exposure of the novelty in commonly used information media is a good start. Then placement in video forms from news to TV shows to movies is helpful. Such instances provide two major opportunities: (1) to see where it should be used, the appropriate contexts; (2) to see how it should be used as a complete behaviour – sound, pace, rhythm, and visualisations face and whole of body expression; and, (3) to motivate its use by providing a positive emotional anchor in the watcher's experience repertoire.

Whateva...

The ubiquitous teenage dismissal 'whateva' comes to mind, a repeat performance in the small dramas of life that has spread across the generations as emblem of the disconnectedness of our times. Is this spread the process through which memes proliferate at somewhat slower speeds? The correct emergence of memes must depend on the development of a broad base of linguistic support, failing which they cannot have a world of new meaning to attach themselves to, grow out of, take root in – choose the development imagery of your choice.

The recent upsurge in adult use of the Homeric "Duh" or "Doh" depending on whose transcript you read of The Simpsons is a case in point with another point lurking in it. The lurker is that fashions repeat. The Homeric had a life in the late Fifties – my teendom – where it appeared as the snide remark of choice for the young's appreciation of our peers' and the generationally compromised (our parents, teachers and such) shortage of intelligence appropriate to any specific circumstance…for not being with it, hip, cool and so on, to whatever passes for the same now.

This effect over time may be another optimystical, too. My failure to see it as such now – the implicit hopefulness in the face of exemplary hopelessness and despair – may be generational or ageing related or just my lack of primary conceptual neurons from the beginning.

Notes

1
1,119,000
webhits in Australia and 119,000,000 worldwide on 310809

2 Acknowledgment of interest – I am a practicing psychotherapist with a client load around 25 per week, registered with Medicare and a half dozen private health insurers in Australia.