Post truth (part 8) - persuasion or propaganda

In the last post, I explored the motivations of those involved in the social agreement for truth, with a focus on how marketing and lobbying work to influence that agreement for their own aims. 

While this influence can be sinister, my main point was that we are rather cavalier about overt manipulation of truth, even as it infiltrates our minds and shapes our actions. The strategies of marketing and lobbying reveal so much about the social construction of truth. 

And yet, still we prefer to think about truth as objective and absolute, and advertising as inconsequential or irrelevant to truth. Many disagree, including the insightful Daniel Boorstin. 

This series began in November 2020 with my puzzlement about the word post-truth and what it means about the word truth. I had no idea then how hard it would be to explore these concepts.

In parts 1 and 2, I pointed out that the false journey metaphor for truth has allowed the emergence of post-truth to be laughed off as a problem of some 'stupid', misinformed or misguided individuals, or decried as the lies of narcissistic or sociopathic political figures to stay in power. 'Objective truth still exists', we say to ourselves: 'They are just wrong'. 

I don't feel so disdainful. I speculated in that post that post-truth is a symptom of a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign to control truth. But I didn't really understand how anyone could succeed in controlling truth. 

To explore this idea, I created a new metaphor, the house construction metaphor for truth. 

In this post I use the house metaphor to think about propaganda, the final word to explore before I can come back to where I started and ponder what we mean by truth and post-truth.

Post-truth (part 6) - the building code for truth

Unlike the dictionary definition provided in part 1, this series has shown that the human relationship to truth involves much more than simply finding information that accords with fact or reality.  

Despite this, we are extremely reluctant to accept that truth is a social agreement using explanatory stories shaped by our cognitive biases and our deep need to believe that makes us feel safe. 

Everything in our being wishes that truth were absolute and objective. Otherwise, it raises a very uncomfortable question. 

If truth is not objective and absolute, is it completely arbitrary, disconnected from facts, even delusional?  

Does accepting that truth is socially constructed also mean accepting that 'facts' don't matter? How can we possibly agree that truth may not accurately reflect reality, when we have deep psychological needs for certainty and understanding how the world works? If we let go of our absolutes and our certainty, what will we hold onto for safety? 

Distress at the idea of truth as a social agreement is the result of a false dichotomy. We wrongly assume that the opposite of an absolute and objective 'real truth' is an arbitrary and delusional 'unreal truth'. But it's much more complicated than this misleading dichotomy. 

A more useful question to ask is what (usually) stops an individual from making up their own arbitrary explanatory story and calling that truth? 

The answer is that the social agreement on truth is tightly controlled and very real. 

Habits - freeing or limiting?

At the beginning of the year, the usual articles about New Year's resolutions rolled out in the media. Yawn.

These were followed by the usual blither on making your resolution into a habit. Same, same.

I didn't make any resolutions. But I did think about habits.

A quote from William James (Habit, 1887)¹ prompted this exploration (my emphasis added): 

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are the subjects of express volitional deliberations." 

Really?! Habits are freeing 'our higher powers of the mind'? Can habits also be limiting? And William, how do we distinguish the 'useful actions' from those 'likely to be disadvantageous'? And are 'express volitional deliberations' so bad?

Yin-yang 2 - seriously not

In Part 1 of this article, I explored the well-known, but often misunderstood, Chinese philosophical symbol of yin-yang. The symbol represents the dynamic, ever-changing and complex nature of the cosmos.

To me, yin-yang is a reminder that dichotomies - seeing the world in simple sets of opposites - can be false and misleading. At its core, yin-yang says: you might think that two things are opposites, but they are not in reality. It warns: do not being misled by false dichotomies.

But we often do, and we often are. 

Source: Deviant Art

Because it is so often misinterpreted, in Yin-yang - not what you think I outlined many things that yin-yang does NOT say or symbolise; specifically, it is:

• not about opposites
• not about achieving balance
• not a feature of things or behaviour
• not an inherent nature of an object or person
• not able to be separated into yin apart from yang; not ‘added’ up to a whole
• not about one ‘half’ being superior to the other.

But people make these various misinterpretations all the time. 

People often refer to yin-yang to make claims about the world being made up of natural opposites needing to achieving balance for harmony. Perversely, this is the ‘opposite’ of what yin-yang actually means.

One common misinterpretation is when people talk about men as yang and women as yin or hold up the yin-yang symbol as justification for rigid dichotomy of gender roles for men and women as a 'natural' way of the world. 

Two wrong dichotomies do not make a right! 

Yin-yang - not what you think

Every now and then, I like stepping back from WHAT we are talking about and look at HOW we talk about it. 

In particular, I find it useful to look at the mental 'boxes' we use when we talk about things; the 'boxes' that we put ourselves and everyone else into, the categories of our daily lives.

The previous article on Gendered adjectives was about the way we tend to see human traits and behaviour as either feminine or masculine. A simplistic dichotomy, given how varied and complex human beings are. 

This got me thinking again about the fascinating human tendency to see the world in dichotomies - categories to which we become quite attached (see more on dichotomies in Gruntled). 

The strange thing is, many of our dichotomies are false, simplistic and unhelpful. 

False dichotomies often lead to false debates about false and sometimes brutal choices in society. We could do a lot better.

Gendered adjectives 2 - human needs and traits

In Part 1 of this article, I explored why the words we use to refer to our gender - our traits, behaviours and social role -  make it such a difficult topic to write about. 

The problem is, we divide most human traits and behaviours according to a dichotomy of masculine or feminine.

The adjectives masculine and feminine are 'normative' - words that carry the concept of 'what is considered normal' and 'how a person should be'. Using them always implies the meaning of 'normal' or 'not normal'. 

But, how can we talk productively about gender if we have to use words that always carry a concept of normal or not normal.

Using feminine about a man's behaviour or masculine about a woman's traits implies they are not a 'real' man or a normal woman. The words can be threatening to our sense of being okay as a person. 

Many people simply cannot have a discussion about gender without feeling threatened or criticised.

I want to find other adjectives to think about and describe human traits, behaviour and roles. Words that leaves gender where it is (it's not going away) but focus instead on the considerably more important concept of being human.

What other adjectives could we use? How else could we talk about humans?

Gendered adjectives 1 - circular definitions and stereotypes

Gender is a difficult topic to write about, and I've long wondered what makes it so tricky.

Because this is Wordly Explorations, I am going to focus on the words we use; more specifically, the adjectives that cloud the topic of gender.

There are very basic definition issues. We get people mixing up the meaning of the words sex (i.e. biology) and gender (i.e. social identity and role). This results in reams of confusion when people discuss (rant about) gender as though it had the same definition as biological sex, e.g.: 'People are born with their gender between their legs and that's it!' Um, what? These are two very different concepts. 

But the real drama happens when we try to debate gender. There are (again) very basic conceptual issues when we try to discuss how humans act (human traits and behaviours) which is the key aspect of a person's social identity and role (i.e. gender). 

We discuss human traits and behaviours with two gendered adjectives: masculine and feminine. A sign that these words are not up to the job is the proliferation of new words; recent examples are gender fluid, non-binary, toxic masculinity, as descriptions of gender. But I don't think these words have helped make anything clearer.

I wonder if we could find other adjectives to conceptualise and describe human traits, behaviour and roles. Words that leave gender where it is (it's not going away) but focus instead on the considerably more important concept of being human. Words that make it possible to discuss this topic and increase shared understanding.

In Part 1 I will explain the specific problem with these gender adjectives, before I suggest some other words we could use in Part 2.

TATKOP 113

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who dispute there are really two kinds of people and those who enjoy playing with dichotomies.

See more in the TATKOP series.

Gruntled - dichotomy humour

Snipped from the socials

By guest explorer: Fred Shivvin

A meme on social media about gruntled being the long-lost opposite of disgrunted caused me to stop scrolling. Haha emoji.

But really? I googled for a while. Heaps of hits resulted - even t-shirts and gruntled websites. The re-discovery of this word seems to have made a lot of people gruntled and amused.

Part of the humour lies in the way the unearthing of gruntled seemed to right a wrong, an unknown sense of something lacking, providing something that should have been there but was not.

Where had the opposite of disgruntled been all this time?