We left off yesterday with the key point that "Speech which emancipates itself from the norm of (real) things, at the same time necessarily becomes speech without a partner" (Pieper). Again, words have a two-way vector, linking to things at one end and minds at the other.
It reminds me of a finger pointing at the moon. Successful communication will have occurred if your partner looks at the moon, not at your finger or a streetlamp.
Another kind of communication will have occurred if a person successfully convinces you a streetlamp is the moon. But this isn't really communication at all; rather, practiced systematically, it "strikes at the very foundation of our existence."
Again, every government engages in such discommunication some of the time, and some do it all the time. Our current crisis of authority and trust has to do with being ceaselessly lied to by our government and its allied institutions (media, academia, woke corporations, etc). The Z Man often touches on this subject. For example,
cooperation is what makes deception possible, as cooperation involve[s] complex rules. An individual can exploit those rules to gain benefit without having to contribute. The more cooperative a society, the more opportunities there are for free riders to game those rules through deception in order to prosper from the cooperation of others in the group.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and you're reelected.
Given that we live in an age of universal deceit, at least by those in positions of authority, the evolution of lying suddenly matters a great deal.... Before the mass media age, it was... much harder to promote official lies. Mass media results in a sense of mass cooperation, which means the communications revolution has revolutionized mass lying.
A revolution of lying. Hmm. I call it a Satanic Coup, or maybe the Endless Insurrection.
institutional lying has exploded over the last thirty years in America. Every day someone from the government stands in front of cameras and blatantly lies about things. They know they are lying. The people in the press room know they are lying. Everyone in the room knows that the people watching it know everyone involved is lying. There is the sense that the people in these positions look at lying as a game where the biggest liar wins the day (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=27934).
That's too cynical even for me. Do they in fact know they're lying? Some do and some don't. AOC, or Karine Jean-Pierre, for example, are far too stupid to know they're spreading misinformation, and Brandon has been lying for so long he doesn't know the difference. Someone knows, but the press is systematically incurious about who.
This absence of curiosity is a passive form of lying, analogous to a "negative hallucination" -- it is Move along, nothing to see here, Don't believe your lyin' eyes, or What johnson? I don't see a man in the swimming pool. Look at the pained faces of Doocy's peers when he goes off narrative with one of his mild provocations. The constipated expressions are a measure of the distance between narrative and reality.
I was just now looking up something by Bion on negative hallucination, but this will have to do:
Truth is essential for mental growth. Without truth the psychic apparatus does not develop and dies of starvation.
Yes, but only the psychic apparatus. The body of course goes on, and our government, media, and universities are teeming with these martyrs to untruth.
That's not just my opinion. Rather it is confirmed by our nonlocal correspondent reporting from the scene of this endless crime:
this highly "perfected" usage of words divorced from their roots in reality, actually has another purpose altogether: that namely this kind of language inevitably becomes an instrument of power, and at bottom is so from the very outset (Pieper).
From the very outset? Yes, as in He was a liar from the beginning. Also a murderer, of course, but his first victim is Truth, and gravity takes care of the rest.
If human beings are trinitarian in nature, it makes sense to undermine them in this way, i.e., via the destruction of the possibility of real communication (which again follows on trust). The moment a person
deliberately ceases to govern his words with a view to stating the reality of things, he automatically ceases to communicate anything. For language becomes communication the moment it expresses a link to reality, and by the same token it ceases to be communication the moment the link is destroyed (ibid.).
Again, the first lie is from the lips of the Serpent (or from God, according to one of our anonymous trolls, even though a "lying God" is a violation of the first principle of logic). In any event,
When one person ceases to speak to another in the artless and spontaneous manner which characterizes genuine conversation, and begins to consciously manipulate his words, expressly ceasing to concern himself with the truth... he has, in reality, from that point on ceased to regard the other person as a partner in a conversation (ibid.).
The left loves to say that "we need to have a conversation" about this or that. Whenever you hear this line, you're about to be treated as a thing in the way of power. You're about to be rolled.
To be continued...
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