The Manufacture of
Consent as Emotional and Cultural Management
http://www.sharelynx.com/web/BDavey/Colinsane.htm
Introduction
The following article came from thoughts
after a Teach In in
When I went away from our Saturday afternoon
Teach In I thought - weren't we missing a few things there? On reflection it
seemed to me that we were listening to Chomsky's theory of the manufacture of
consent by the New York Times and CNN. But this is only a part of the process
of Manufacturing Consent - focusing on what, in Britain, we call the chattering
classes, the people Chomsky describes as the top 20%, the 'relatively well
educated' elite. As a description of the manufature of consent through the news
media what he says is useful - however consent is also manufactured through
films, television and through the advertising industry in a process of
emotional management, through fictional narratives and genres.
In Chomsky's view, it seems, what matters
is how news information about different topics is ratio-ned out in column
inches and ratio-ned in hours/minutes of coverage. What matters too is how the
issues are framed and interpreted - and what the media empires deem relevant
for discussion. In all of this the agendas of powerful economic interests, the
corporate elite who own the arms industries, the oil companies and - surprise,
surprise - the news empires too, as well as those who buy their place in
government through donations to the electoral campaigns, all these set the
ratio-nality of what is read and seen. It is the view of this corporate elite,
and their priorities, that get re-presented in the media, as 'truth' for all
the rest of us.
However, this presentation of the issues
says nothing about the manufacture of consent through framing cultural norms in
fiction and film. What about advertising and PR as another dimension in the
moulding of motivations and emotional responses? What about
Chomsky, in my view, is a professor,
saying how the consent of 'intellectuals' is obtained. I dare say he does not
have a lot of time to watch movies and it shows in his analysis (if I have a
fair understanding of his viewpoint).
The management of emotions in a
hierarchical society
My thesis here is that the manufacture of
consent is also about emotional management by the media. There is
far more to it than the management of ideas and information. The media creates,
not just information about news but is a dream factory. In
It is not the place here to develop a
complete theory of the emotions. Suffice it to say that feelings and emotions
are a part of the response repertoire of the human animal just like every other
animal. Hunger and thirst have a motivational role in our behaviour and so too
do fear, anger and joy. Fear and anger are part of the flight or flight
response patterns while love and joy have positive reinforcing functions for
the human organism in its social interactions. In an equalitarian social
organisation everyone would recognise the feelings of others as similar, and
equally valid to their own. The recognition of own feelings, and those of
others, would guide social interaction. However, in inequalitarian social
formations, things are more complicated. Emotions must be denied, and
invalidated, if the social hierarchy is to be maintained. For example, the
expression of anger is not allowed upwards, against 'social superiors', and
fear is not a valid excuse for running away on a battlefield. At the same time
love and respect is expected of superiors, even though they may be bullies,
cheats and ruthlessly exploitiative. This leads, in the words of therapists, to
people 'losing touch with their feelings'. It is common, when their boss winds
them up, for people to 'bottle up' their feeings and then find fault with
someone more vulnerable in the process known as scapegoating. They commonly do
not recognise that this is what is happening - on the contrary they really do
develop a loathing of scapegoats.
Channelling negative feelings - away from
power structures
Emotional management is necessary to any
hierarchical society. Typically, negative feelings are channelled downwards -
against scapegoats, the socially outcaste and excluded. In times of
particularly deep social crisis negative feelings are turned outwards against
foreign enemies and other communities. In Orwell's novel, 1984, with his bleak
vision of the future, war is a continual fact of life - it serves to channel
all discontent against 'the enemy'and smother it internally.
It should be stressed, and I will come
back to this, that the process here described is not, mainly, a conscious conspiracy,
it is rather a process in which the main "players", are largely
unconscious of what they are "acting out". The words "acting
out" are very appropriate here as people find their collective purposes
and joint orientation through sharing, and identifying with, their communitys'
institutions of authority. This common identification and loyalty is embedded
and embodied in the awareness of common narratives, in the myths and symbols of
those institutions. Hi/story is a collection of stories that are shared. To be
a member of a community is to be involved in the history of that community - it
is to see yourselves as participating in, and continuing the story of the
community. The symbols, the flags, the ceremonies, the oaths of allegiance, are
all meant to serve to remind, as well as to reassure people. They tell people
that their safety and their security, lies in membership of the group, and that
membership of the group provides at least a tiny part, as a bit player or
extra, in a familiar story line, the well understood drama of a nation, or of a
smaller community.
Symbols, Theatre and Display in the
Management of Power
In this respect ruling elites have
commonly sought, through theatricality, through pageantry, through embroidered
symbols and display, to dazzle like peacocks and overawe their subjects. If the
subjects were expected to rally to, and defend, the royal standard, then the
royal standard could not be any old piece of rag. Continuing in this tradition
the twentieth century, more than any other, gave power elites techologies for
emotional management through theatricality, the like of which dwarfed what had
come before. Adolf Hitler, a failed artist with a taste for Wagner, who named
his military campaigns after Wagners operas, organised his rallies on a huge
scale. Just the bringing together, and disciplining of such large numbers, in
ordered lines and rows, had a powerful emotional effect. To this was added a
luxurious forest of symbols and flags with the logo of the Nazi party, the
swastika. The function of the symbol is here to provide an instantly
recognisable visual image that expresses a bigger narrative - with which one
has an emotional identification and loyalty. Like today's commercial logos,
there was a set of emotional associations, ideas and narratives behind the
image. These narratives and ideas helped to define the kind of person a 'decent
member of the community' is. They defined the ideas that one could believe in,
and 'know to be true'. From early on skilled film makers like Leni Reifensthal,
lent the skills for their new art of cinematography to help build up the images
and pictures for this world view - not just in words, but in pictures of brave
young clean cut men, and well behaved girls in white blouses, fresh, sun tanned
faces, and pigtails.
In the video of Chomskys ideas that we
saw at our Teach In we heard Chomsky say that dictatorships do not operate
through the manipulation of the news media as in democracies, rather they
operate through fear, they simply tell people what they must do. As these words
were being expressed, however, what we saw on the screen was not simple
intimidation. There were clips of the huge Nazi rallies, with thousands of
banners and flags. This content of the image, did not appear to be picked up on,
in Chomsky's message - namely that there is a role for mass theatre in
manufacturing consent. Mass theatre helps create the emotional conditions for
obedience - out of a sense of belonging to the disciplined crowd, all sharing
the emotionally reassuring certainty of a common belief system, as a way 'out
of chaos'. (In 1930s
Missing this point meant we are in danger
of also missing the role of theatre, spectacle, fiction and drama in the
manufacture of consent today.
It is important in this respect to
recognise that Big Lies emerge in periods of social and economic
chaos. People are desperate, not only because they find it difficult to make
ends meet, but also because they find it difficult to understand what is
happening. Behind the symbols are simple explanations. Instead of the
complicated explanation of what is wrong there is the simpler message of who is
to blame. A target is set up for the frustration and hate - baddies are
identified (Jews, communists, Muslims, Greens, Christians, petty bourgeois
intellectual pessimists..). And the simple explanations are connected to a
simple message of what is to be done - you are to do what you are told in the
hierarchy of loyalty and obedience. Of course, if there is a hierarchy, there
must be someone at the top - this person is then seen as being unable to do any
wrong. He becomes a daddy forthe whole folk, or class, with power to punish as
he sees fit. Hence the logic, and psychology, of the personality cult.
What the propoganda machines do, then,
are to create a spurious sense of emotional reassurance and certainty,
by building up in people's minds, a pattern of emotional associations,
associated with a political machine and its lies, which is being sold/fed to
them by the daddy of the state..
As Adolf Hitler put it so succinctly
"What good fortune for those in power that people do not think".
Television,
But it is not only overtly propoganda
films, made for dictatorial states, that play an emotional management role.
American society more than any other society in the world, has a social
psychology structured by television and film. People in the
Paul Kennedy, in his book, "Preparing
for the Twenty First Century" quotes figures in which the average
American child has watched five thousand hours of television before entering
school and by graduation this total will be nearly twenty thousand hours.
"Apart from certain groups (Jews, Asian-Americans), the average American
child is said to be picking up the vaue system of a shallow entertainment
industry rather than the mental standards, discipline and intellectual
curiosity that equip a person to learn" . In this regard Kennedy is also
concerned to point out that the average American has an average of three or
four years less schooling than the average Japanese or Korean.....(p 307-8).
Kennedy is Professor of History at
One of her findings was completely
unexpected: Notel adults were a good deal brighter than those of the other two
towns. They were much better at creative problem-solving tests, and those
individuals who were unable to solve tasks would try for much longer than
Multitel or Unitel people before giving up. As for the children of Notel they
came top of the three town league when they were given the Alternative Uses Task,
a standard test in which subjects are asked how many things they can do with
something, like a sheet of newspaper. This is a more revealing test than it
sounds because it points to what psychologists call ideational fluency, or the
ability to form ideas or mental images and is a good indicator of overall
creativity and the ability to think properly. The Notel youngsters did not come
out top on all tests, however. In one they came last - that which tested them
for aggression. It soon became clear to Dr Williams that the young and old were
making much better use of their brains than their counterparts in the other two
towns.
A year after television had arrived
things were different. There was a dramatic drop in community participation,
with fewer people going to public dances, parties, meetings, concerts, parades
and bingo than before they had television in their homes. Moreover when the
young people were tested for physical and verbal aggression they now scored
above the two control towns.
Quoted in Richard Douthwaite "The
Growth Illusion" Green Books p168
The influence of the media on mass
awareness is therefore much more reaching than in its selectivity, and in its
choice of interpretations of news information. It affects the whole social
structure in a much more profound way. It actually makes people stupid and
breaks down community life.
Understanding the World through
Narratives, Stories and Genres
In this respect most people in the
Any narrative, in any medium, can have
help to form a world view for people. Many similar narratives are described
collectively as making up 'a genre' and repeated exposure to genres, over and
over again, mould's peoples' implicit views of how the world is, beyond their
individual experience.
Put in another way - many people do not
see the world through explicit, thought-out ideologies, but through
genres. Some even rely on specific scripts, that they have seen acted
out, to understand things. (I recently had an e mail exchange with an American
soap actress. Her way of getting a grip on what I wrote to her, was to compare
what was going on, and the different interpretations that I sent in my e mails,
to the scripts of different movies).
As I have already made clear,
interpretation through stories is not new to the age of film and television.
Many cultures and communities have their common roots in collections of
stories. The Bible, for example, is a collection of stories, that people delve
into to look for precedents, and guidelines, for their contemporary actions,
orientation and behaviour. To help people understand an idea, you insert it
into a narrative. Very few people go to the trouble of reading essays like this
to understand the world - an essay is a non narrative way of
understanding things.
Common narratives then define the
collective identities and responses of whole societies, as well as of their
leaders. They structure the 'collective unconscious' of the society and that,
in turn, tends to structure how the society will act in world affairs. In the
USA the westerns, as well as more contemporary gangster movies, are a
collection of narratives, a genre, that have sunk deep into the mental life of
America (and the rest of the world too). The
Cowboy and gangster films, for example,
typically give the impression that adult life is a violent saga in which men
have to be tough. However, there is usually a reassuring angle and ending - a
silver lining to the bleak underlying message. In this violent world there are
there are Clint Eastwood, John Wayne or Superman types around to help decent
folks. Nowadays these model heroes, for example, your local cop, are quite
often cynical on the surface, but if you dig deep enough these pure American
types are basically decent too. Even more reassurring, these basically decent
types usually defeat the criminal psychopaths, the embodiment of pure evil.
(These evil types, who do not shave and wear darker clothing, are, it seems to
be found just about everywhere, except small town suburban America, where
decent people escape to bring up the kids, their pets and look after wise old
Grandpop..).
The manufacture of consent is therefore
not only created through how many column inches there are on a topic in the New
York Times. It is created by the political leadership casting itself in the
mould of goodies - against the baddies 'out there', in the lawless territories
beyong the American borders - and creating the confidence that
When George Bush talks to the American
"folk" of getting bin Laden, "dead or alive" it strikes a
cultural chord, and he acts out the role of world sheriff. In this respect
there is no reason for us to think of him 'pretending' to be in this role. He
is not consciously acting. Nor is he probably being advised to do this by a PR
company. He is acting out how he sees an American archetype. As long as he is
winning he is understandable and immensely popular. (Just as bin Laden appears
to be seeking to act out the David versus Goliath archetype, a romantic Che
Guevara or Robin Hood character for frustrated Muslim communities).
So how is this mass psychology to be
managed to support a war? Well, it is not too difficult:
"A poll conducted last week in the
The unanimously supportive coverage given
to the war by all the main news media in the
"Every country in times of crisis or
war can generally rely on a supportive media - as happened in the United Kingdom
during the "Gotcha!" phase of the Falklands War - but a growing
number of American commentators are expressing disquiet at what they feel is a
lack of information which the media may deem in some way harmful or
unpatriotic.....
..........Leslie Bennetts, writing in the
current edition of Vanity Fair, says that "Americans like a simple
storyline that makes it easy to decide who the good guys are and who the bad
guys are and the byzantine tangle of international politics, Islamic
fundamentalism and American foreign policy is making many citizens unused to
grappling with such headache-inducing complexities want to throw up their
hands."
Bennetts suggests that "American
newspapers and television companies have reduced their foreign coverage by 70
to 80% during the last 15 to 20 years in response to corporate demands for
profits."
Consequently, the public is unaware of
much of what is happening elsewhere in the world.
(Duncan Campbell "Where no news
is good news" The Guardian,
Although Chomsky stresses, with reason,
the way in which the media interprets and limits what information is presented
to people it is therefore equally the case that the media presents its story to
a public with genre based world views that manages feelings in a reassuring
way.
It is a world in which fact and fiction
are difficult to distinguish. Researchers of the media have noted the phenomena
that, in their "para-social relationships" with TV stars, people can
lose touch with the distinction between fiction and reality. ".....the
distinction between soap characters and real-life celebrities may be
considerably blurred....Indeed there are numerous reports of soap characters
being treated by the general public as though 'in character'. For example, when
a character experiences misfortune in a story line, television companies are
often besieged with flowers and letters from viewers. It is reported that
during the first five years of his appearance in the popular series Marcus
Welby M.D., actor Robert Young received over a quarter of a million letters
from viewers, asking for medical advice." ( David Giles "Illusions
of Immortality. A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity" MacMillan Press,
2000. p.64).
This being the case, it seems obvious to
surmise that many people are going to be incredibly susceptible to created
story lines and narratives deliberately constructed to bamboozle them to
believe comforting lies.
Special effects - the new technologies of
fiction
At the time the Teach In was happening in
For the purposes of this article I am
less concerned as to what has actually happened in this particular video, as by
the new possibilities for manipulating people's perceptions of the reality,
that have been revealed by the case. The implications, it seems to me, are that
it in the future it will be even more difficult to tell fact from fantasy in
the public realm. This is especially so, when we think about the significance
of reports, that
Sean Broughton, director of the
London-based production company Smoke and Mirrors and one of
The first step would be to transfer
images shot on videotape on to film tape. Distortion or "noise" and
graininess would be removed. A "morphing package" would then be used
to manipulate the image on a computer screen.
Using such a package it is possible to
alter the subject's mouth and expressions to fit in with whatever soundtrack is
desired. The final step is to put the "noise" and graininess back on
and transfer the doctored images on to videotape.
In a recent advert that Smoke and Mirrors
made for a US insurance company, the technique was used to place Bill Clinton's
head on an actor's body for comic effect.
Mr Broughton said that while it would be
relatively easy to fake a Bin Laden video, to fool the top experts was much
more difficult. "There are perhaps 20 people in
Bob Crabtree, editor of the magazine Computer
Video, said it was impossible to judge whether the video was a fake without
more details of its source. "The
Modern communications technology have
therefore reached a sort of limit. The communications empires, owned by the
same magnates who also own and control the arms industries, now have the
capabilities to broadcast bed time fictions, scripted in Hollywood, to reassure
people about what is going on in the world - and to frame their enemies
visually, apparently out of 'their own' mouths, with incriminating scripts,
written by a script writer. I do not know the truth of the bin Laden tape. That
is just the point. In the future media presentations of facts may be 'special
effects'.
Ignor-ance and pre-judice in the
manufacture of consent
This will make it more difficult to
filter information, and to interpret it. Of course, everyone must choose
how much they try to understand and act in the wider world. None of us
are able to devote all our time to trying to understand how things are in the
world beyond our day to day life, beyond the places and the people we know. The
harder we have to work, the more time we have to spend in the struggle to make
ends meet, and bring up a family, the less time there is to devote to
understanding situations that we may not feel much power over anyway. That
being so, so much the more inclined we are likely to be, when we return home
exhausted from work, to occupy ourselves with apparently mindless entertainment
- which is perncious precisel in the way it gives us easy and reassuring
messages about ourselves and our culture in their story lines, and which
manages our feelings by suggesting to us who to dislike for all of our problems
(the baddies).
To a degree this also applies to many
highly educated people - many will be highly stressed and pre-occupied by the
struggle to survive in their work. To find the energy to switch over to
studying other matters is difficult. If they are already stressed, they may be
even less inclined to study situations, that are also likely to be complicated
and distressing. The media makes it easy for them - it obliges by helping them
ignore such matters. It keeps them willingly ignor-ant - or,
worse, it helps them in their pre-judgements of situations, in the creating of
a pre-judices.
However, this then leave millions of
people bewildered when vast world events occur, for which they have no frame of
reference - events in which others clearly act out of loathing and hatred for
the country and community that these people belong to......Perish the thought,
it seems incomprehensible - but others seem to think that they are the baddies!
As an American child that I saw interviewed on CNN said, "Why do people
hate Americans? It doesn't add up". The media rushes to reassure and put
them back to sleep.
A comparison of individual insanities
with collective ones
What we are talking about here are
collective psychological mechanisms which, if we were describing an individual,
would be recognised as mental ill health - because they lead people further and
further away from contact with the complexities of painful realities.
There are, in fact, different types of
individual insanity. It is helpful to understand the features of these
insanities to contrast them with the collective type.
By far the most common kind of insanity,
numerically, is that of disempowered people who are severely isolated. They
have typically been driven, by the evolving circumstances of their lives, and
the choices that they made in those difficult circumstances, out of an active,
meaningful and productive relationship with a community. They live in a fantasy
world because, in their isolation, they are not embedded in relationships where
they can reality check, in joint activities and living arrangements. What
happens in these circumstances is that these people's thoughts take the form of
the day dreams to fill their empty lives - lives devoid of love, friendship and
positive activity. Their thoughts are driven by paranoid fear of what might
happen, but also by wishful thinking. Their thoughts are typically driven by
the past experience of betrayal and abuse and they therefore distrust, they are
driven by disappointment - so they do not hope, they are driven by the fear of
further humiliation. In their inactivity and isolation they live in a constant
day dream. These day dreams often have an emotionally compensatory character -
for example the idea that one day this severely isolated and powerless person
will be discovered to be a fantastically important individual, whose suffering
has a magical purpose and meaning for the world.
Meglomanias - insanity arising when power
is unchecked
But isolation and powerlessness is not
the only way to lose touch with the wider reality. Madness is also something
that can afflict very powerful people. In the case of meglomaniac insanity a
very powerful person loses contact with reality because their power is so great
that no one dare challenge them with the truth. (This is the narrative of
"the Emperor's New Clothes"). Typically this person surrounds
themselves with sycophants and 'yes' people who tell them only what they want
to hear. And meanwhile they prevent everyone else getting to know anything at
all that could be used against them in criticism. This they do, by making no
distinction between what is in their own personal interest, and what is in the
broader collective and community interest.
News reports yesterday said,
"President Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time Thursday to
keep Congress from seeing documents of prosecutor 's decision-making
[regarding] the Clinton-era fund-raising probe." Bush said, "Congressional
access to these documents would be contrary to the national interest."
Translated: "Congressional access to these documents would be contrary to
my interest."
................The question must be
asked: what is Bush trying to hide?
Could it be that if Congress uncovers
foreign influence within the
The Herald goes on to say, "Nowhere
is the revolving U.S.-Saudi money wheel more evident than within President
Bush's own coterie of foreign policy advisers, starting with the president's
father, George H.W. Bush."
The report further states, "At the
same time that the elder Bush counsels his son on the ongoing war on terrorism,
the former president remains a senior adviser to the Washington, D.C.-based
Carlyle Group. That influential investment bank has deep connections to the
Saudi royal family as well as financial interests in U.S. defense firms hired
by the kingdom to equip and train the Saudi army."
This more-than-casual connection between
Bush and the Saudi monarchy is causing U.S. policy makers to turn a blind eye
to things that would otherwise "cause our blood to boil," because no
one wants to "stop the gravy train." (Remember that the vast majority
of the September 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.)
People mentioned in the Herald report as
participating in ongoing covert, international influence peddling include
"former U.S. officials, former presidents, aides to the current president
.people who are the pillars of American society and officialdom."
That Bush is hiding much seems obvious.
What exactly is he hiding? Maybe we do not want to know - and it looks like we
never will......(Web article by Chuck Baldwin).
Of course, there are people out there who
are prepared to challenge this. Were there not a war on there are a lot of
people that would have a lot to complain about - the spectacular fraud at
Enron, for example, a company which George Bush has been deeply involved with.
Rivalries, with people defending themselves close to the heart of the power
structure, represents a threat of all to political machines. There can be bust
ups in the power structure itself - when the people who set the agenda fall out
among themselves - however war has always been a way to enforce a unity in this
kind of situation - where there would otherwise be dissension.
Euphoria - Gung ho into disaster
A war, with small losses and big
victories to report, managed carefully by the media, helps to create a
"feel good" or, more accurately a "feel strong" factor. It
creates a kind of euphoria. Once again there are parallels that can be drawn
between this collective situation, and individual mental health crises. There
are ocasions where a person loses touch with reality, not out of pessimism, but
because they begin to think that they can get away with anything. They lose any
sense of limit and boundraries. They come to feel that they can do anything
that they like. When he was in Paris, after the fall of France, Adolf Hitler
did a little victory dance, hopping in his boots, for sheer joy in front of the
Eiffel Tower. But that euphoric mood can create miscalculations - in Hitler's
case, the invasion of Russia.
Without any perception of countervailing
power, unchallenged leaders and their crony networks become euphoric. They make
more and more audacious decisions until, eventually, they overreach themselves,
in a sort of collective mania....
Last Friday the celebrated American
pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote an article entitled Victory changes
everything...? It contained the following paragraph: "The elementary
truth that seems to elude the experts again and again - Gulf war, Afghan war,
next war - is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything,
psychology above all. The psychology in the region is now one of fear and deep
respect for American power. Now is the time to use it to deter, defeat or
destroy the other regimes in the area that are host to radical Islamic
terrorism.".....
......It was part of a diptych of linked
stories and, of the two, it was in a way the more moderate. Krauthammer was,
surprisingly, not in favour of an immediate all-guns-blazing assault on Iraq.
Instead he favoured sorting out Sudan, Syria, Libya and Yemen ... "and
then on to Iraq". But alongside his column was one by a Post regular,
Richard Cohen, who was in favour of toppling Saddam Hussein at once.
This is a reasonable microcosm of the
average Washington debate these days. Do we take out Saddam this week or next?
Do we attack one country or five? Shall we wipe out everyone who disagrees with
us, or just most of them? It goes on round liberal dinner tables as well as on
the op-ed pages. There has not been such a popular war since the swells danced
jigs through London clubland in August 1914. Since September 11, hardly any
harm has befallen Americans even in the battle zone. More journalists have been
killed than GIs. We can't stop here! The fun's hardly started yet! A Newsweek
poll even has 56% in favour of sending "large numbers of US ground
troops" to Iraq.....(Matthew
Engel, Iraqmania, The Guardian December 5th 2001).
Throughout history rulers have sent off
their troops absolutely confident they could not lose - because they had never
lost before, and they are surrounded by people who tell them what they want to
hear. Such people are defended by propoganda machines who spin fantasy after
fantasy to keep ordinary people bamboozled.
T-reason
The results, over and again, are
absolutely disasters for these ordinary people - until, finally, the chickens
come home to roost. Eventually more and more people get wise to what is happening.
But, before they can act, those who dare to speak out are subjected to
ferocious repression:
Hans Magnus Enzenberger, in his essay on
Treason, in his book, Raids and Reconstructions, quotes the
Sultan of Delhi, Mohammed Tughlak: "Today there are far more unruly
people than there used to be. I punish them as soon as I have the slightest
suspicion of their rebellious or traitorous intention, and the slightest act of
disobedience I punish by death. I will continue to do this until the people
start to behave decently and give up rebellion and disobedience...I punish the
people because all of a sudden they became my enemies and opponents."
In America at the moment the military
tribunals, secret courts that can try foreign nationals deemed to be implicated
in the war on terror, and execute them, without any of the normal legal
safeguards, look as if they might be starting that process.
In conclusion - the struggle to stay sane
This is a situation in which, it has to
be said, it is difficult for opponents of the process to keep their
sanity. Emotions drive, and structure, thought processes. When a particular
emotion is in control of the intellect, it is very difficult to get a balanced
interpretation, one that remains open minded about other possibilities. For
example, frustrated by the wickedness of one's enemies, the possibilities that
some events and actions have 'innocent causes', may not given proper weight.
The temptation is great to assume, and present the actions of others, as always
arising from calculated malevolent, or from their corrupt motives. But critics
of power structures can over interpret, they can makes mistakes, and these
mistakes can be used to discredit them. Indeed, the 'odder' people's thinking
is, because it deviates from the cultural norm, the more they are rejected as
mentally unstable, and the more likely they are to be invalidated - by
acquiring a psychiatric label.
Fear is another emotion which can
severely distort the attempt to remain objective and open minded. Paranoia is a
mental state, driven by fear, of heightened sensitivity to potential dangers.
In order not to take chances in this high fear state the most frightening
interpretations are taken, not just as possibles, but as probables, or as
realities - and from the hip actions are taken on the most frighening
assumptions. The paranoid person does not first try to find out if the glint in
the sunlight is that of the sun reflected on a gun surface, or of something
else, before they act - they are already into their second machine gun burst.
In order to make sense of things paranoics, like everyone else, look for
patterns in things. What can then happen is that they hoover up great
collections of facts, apparent connections between people and events,
noticeable inconsistencies in the official reports, and so on. They notice what
no one else has noticed and then make out their case about the malevolence of
the powers that be.
However, there is a tendency to
"over interpret", to find "significance" where there
actually is none. For example I have now read two paranoid artices on the web
which call attention to the significance, in one case to the number 11, in the
other case, to the number 13. In the mass of details, of any extremely
complicated and wide reaching event, it would be very surprising if you could
not find a number - that you could then rediscover, over and over again. (There
are 110 stories in the towers, a multiple of 11; there were 11 days of mourning
declared, the WTC attack occurred on Sept 11th etc. etc. ). Once you start
looking out, for any number you will probably start noticing it all over the
place. That says something about how human perception works more than anything
about "external reality".
A further observation is that this
"magic number noticing" sometimes gives the reassuring idea that the
'number noticer' is a part of a great mysterious process, a cosmic drama on
earth, a piece of occult theatre, whose greater meaning will one day be
revealed, together, naturally, with their very special place in this bigger
scheme. Of course, all that is really happening is that they are fantasing a
personally important role to play in this cosmic drama of the "soon to be
revealed" meanings. Its a reassuring idea when one is confronting very powerful
institutions that a cosmic drama is going on behind it all - as one can
fantasise that magical, unseen, powers will come to one's aid. But that is a
train of thought that can take you into madness....
That, more generally, is one of the
problems in the paranoid perspective and a problem in lot of the detail in the
conspiracy theories. There are indeed some peculiar connections and
coincidences out there - some of which ought to be investigated - however there
are often other ways of explaining these apparent connections which are
"innocent". The problem is that, by not being more careful when
drawing attention to these kind of connections, conspiracy theorists end up
discrediting themselves and all their other "leads".
While the world goes crazy, it's a
struggle to try to retain our own mental health.
Brian Davey
December 2001
© BRIAN DAVEY