Problems of Perception

My intellectual manifesto and a raison d'être for this newsletter

Often my focus in writing is about digging into an issue and finding the intellectual flaw that holds it together.   Usually ideas come in the form of insight where I get an ‘aha’ moment and I see the error of a particular stance or the misleading message from a propaganda network.  Other times I may be describing an experience with a person where I notice poor argumentation.

Fallacies, biases, manipulations, denial and other psychological phenomena are the nuts and bolts of misunderstanding and the distortion of reality.  This is the stuff of propaganda.  Most people who unwittingly spread propaganda don’t recognize it as such.  We are most often arguing, debating and believing distortions like these and don’t see it.  Most people are unaware that such tricks of the mind exist.  And those who know of them usually can’t spot them or catch themselves or others using them in a statement in real time.

So, in short, I’m saying everyone is full of shit.  This raises deep and important questions:

How do we get tricked or trick ourselves?  Can we learn to think more clearly?

How can we recognize and decode and inoculate ourselves from propaganda?

Could we come to notice fallacious argumentation in ourselves and others?

How does a person reckon with the fluid and often faulty nature of perception?

How can we have a beginner's mind when we consider our stances and perceptions?

A simple answer must include vigilance and practice. We must remain always curious about our ideas and humble enough to recognize that we may have arrived at them by faulty means.

There is always more to a story than we can see.  That’s where a beginner's mind comes in.

We must view our collection of beliefs with a suspicious eye. We come to conclusions via a process with steps along the way.  Every step has potential pitfalls, where arguments that seem to make sense on the surface turn out to be faulty.  Especially those that elicit an emotional reaction in us.  Those presenting us ideas may have used poor but salacious argumentation, made leaps of faith, jumped to conclusions, used distorted thinking, presented fallacies in lieu of logic, and had hidden biases.  In a sea of data, our minds try to find answers, often using pattern recognition and mental shortcuts.  Predicting that the Mind will jump to these conclusions can make us more disciplined. 

And finally, with propaganda and advertisements as examples, let’s remember that we live in a world where not everyone is honest.  Not everyone has our needs in mind.  We are being manipulated by political parties, businesses, and other institutions with their own agendas.   We can begin with the stance that most public entities are selling us something.  They often package the information they want us to believe in the form of a narrative whose accuracy is less important than its efficacy. The narrative, the relatable story, makes the information manageable and palatable.   Our minds love a good story, especially one where we get to be the hero.   Stories that feel good sell products.  Stories that make us feel good about ourselves sell even more products, this is called humoring.  But stories that make us feel bad may rouse us into action, bypassing our logical mind to access our primitive amygdala.  This is where propaganda comes in.  Propaganda pushes our fear buttons so we are primed to look at others with suspicion.  Then we can find affiliation with others who are suspicious of other groups.  Then we feel good again.

This is how nations get divided and scapegoats get sent off to camps and worse.  The 20th Century was a cautionary tale; Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, Communist Russia and other examples of propaganda leading to genocide abound.  Tens of millions died in WW2.  But the majority of that genocide took place within the borders of said nations.  Autocrats like Hitler turned a benevolent populace against a convenient scapegoat, via propaganda and 6 million Jews were massacred.

The process of propagandizing and amassing absolute power took years from Hitler’s election in 1932 until the bloody end of WW2 in 1945.

So while I love to discuss the talking points of the day, to speak up for my candidate of choice, I prefer a deeper focus.  Let’s look beneath the surface and explore the arguments themselves. Let’s decode them and notice who may be propagandizing us.  We must develop this ability before we share media or talking points that may be misleading.  Otherwise, we become a stooge, carrying water for a demagogue.

And finally, we must assess and be willing to renounce our affiliations.  We must recognize that we may have been unwittingly propagandized to the point of cult status.  This is where humility serves, for we are all prone to manipulation.  We are all vulnerable to the manipulations of those who seek to sway us to their agendas.

The only fighting chance we have is to arm ourselves with at least a passing familiarity with the tools of the propagandist.  Otherwise, we know not whom we serve.  The gruesome costs of ignorance are everywhere: Civil War Memorials, the still standing Death Camps in Europe.  And yet Anti-Semitism abounds, as does a sunny and absolutely falsifiable revisionist history about our Civil War, known colloquially as the Lost Cause.  Propagandists also want to rewrite history: even selling unwitting consumers on the idea that the Holocaust never happened.  How much easier will that be when all the survivors of the death camps are long dead?

Such is the slippery nature of perception.  We can be made to believe lies.  And these lies lead to stances, which lead to votes.  And those votes can and do empower autocrats to take more and more power.  And they never willingly give it back.