To Create, and to Mislead…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The imagination is a beautiful thing.

The imagination is a dangerous thing.

Contradictory statements?

Maybe. But both are absolutely true.

The problem comes in figuring out when the imagination is good, and when it is bad.

After making this statement on Facebook just the other day, I decided to look further into the issue.

“The longer I live the more I wonder how so many humans can allow themselves to be so mislead by a few uneducated pundits,” I wrote.

Then I started to Google.

Fairly quickly, I tapped into a line of research I knew existed on “the awesome power of the human brain to create its own reality.”

Someone who blogs under the moniker “a layman’s journey from religion to reason,” had this to say on the positive side of the imagination.

“Isn’t this imagined reality the muse that an artist taps into when she envisions a sculpture that doesn’t yet exist, or a song that no one’s yet sung? Could we maintain our astounding human ability to find patterns and connections among disparate pieces and leap to a higher understanding, if we couldn’t ‘see’ a whole that isn’t actually visible? Would anyone have flashes of inventive genius, or reach unexpected insights while dreaming, if the mind didn’t run unbidden on its own course at times?”

Of course. Yes. The imagination is good for creating fiction.

Not so good for factual journalism, except for the use of language and imagery to help communicate a story to tap into the primary method of human communication and understanding — a spoken or written narrative.

But what of people who consider themselves to be “open-minded” believers in the supernatural “who are so often close-minded toward the brain’s wonders?”

Science and skeptical thinking show it again and again.

“The mind has amazing faculties to delude itself.”

In the book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark One, scientist Carl Sagan debunks the paranormal and the unexplained.

He shows how purported UFO encounters and alien abductions are products of gullibility, hallucination, misidentification, hoax and therapists’ pressure. Some alleged encounters, he suggests, may screen memories of sexual abuse.

He labels as hoaxes the crop circles, complex pictograms that appear in southern England’s wheat and barley fields, and he dismisses as a natural formation the Sphinx-like humanoid face incised on a mesa on Mars, first photographed by a Viking orbiter spacecraft in 1976 and considered by some so-called “scientists” to be the engineered artifact of an alien civilization.

In a passionate plea for scientific literacy, Sagan deftly debunks the myth of Atlantis and brands as superstition all ghosts, angels, fairies, demons, astrology, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster — and religious apparitions.

Then, of course, there are simple optical illusions, which we all know about from magic shows and films, especially by greats such as Alfred Hitchcock.

An optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from objective reality. The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a percept that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source. There are three main types: literal optical illusions that create images that are different from the objects that make them, physiological ones that are the effects on the eyes and brain of excessive stimulation of a specific type (brightness, tilt, color, movement), and cognitive illusions where the eye and brain make unconscious inferences.

OK, you say, but what does this have to do with politics and government?

Plenty. More on that in a minute.

First, another academic leap to set this up.

Facebook Focus Group

If you have not figured this out by now, here’s the thing. I’m using my experience on the social networking site called Facebook as part of a larger societal focus group to watch and study how people learn, interact and express themselves, and how that translates into media coverage and political action.

I’m sure graduate students all over the world are doing the same, although you will never hear about it, unless you dig through a library where they house such things.

I’m doing it to help build the Web Press of the future, knowing democracy does not work without the Watchdog Press.

Here’s a hint of where I’m coming from.

On Facebook just the other day, I hooked up with an old friend from childhood who had never heard of the brightest living soul born and raised on Alabama soil. The greatest scientist ever from Alabama, E. O. Wilson, the father of Sociobiology, proposed a theory in the late 1990s to begin the attempt to bring together knowledge from the hard sciences (like Biology), the social sciences (like Psychology, Political Science and communications) and the humanities (like English and the study of language and narrative story telling).

The theory was called Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, the title of a book published in 1998. Wilson prefers and uses the term consilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor.

As far as I know, it has not exactly caught on, yet. But then, any overarching theory takes awhile to explode the dominant paradigm in academia, as anyone who ever went to grad school knows.

Wilson’s hypothesis of biophilia and the field of Sociobiology have spawned academic programs all over the world, including evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology departments at hundreds, maybe thousands, of universities.

As it happens, none of those programs exist at a single college or university in Alabama, Wilson’s native state, and that is a problem. Nor is there a single environmental sociology program or class taught in this state, which leaves a gaping hole in our education system here.

Even at the University of Tennessee, where Wilson attended briefly before transferring to Harvard, the guy who ended up being the dean of the Graduate School of Communications — and a conservative member of my doctoral dissertation committee — dismissed Wilson’s theory as “eugenics” without even reading anything about it other than a paragraph or two on how I proposed to use it to help explain how the media influences public opinion on the environment.

Like I said, and Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, changing paradigms is hard.

But what if we could take all the important stuff we know about Biology, including the Biology of the brain, and consider it alongside what we know about Psychology and Sociology and Political Science, then take what we know about how humans communicate, including how they use media, to find a way to debunk the myths that hold us back from developing successful government systems?

Actually, we knew a fair amount about this stuff back in the early 20th century, but what knowledge we had got buried when the corporations started gobbling up newspapers and turning them into conglomerate chains and used them for making profits, not to educate people to be better citizens in a democratic society.

We know WAY more about this now, but the information is not being used for its rightful purpose because a few rich and powerful people have too much to lose to let this Genie out of the bottle.

Do you think the recent Supreme Court ruling giving corporations unlimited power to funnel money into political advertising has nothing to do with this? Think again.

For the rich and powerful, Republicans and Democrats, to remain in charge of the affairs of the planet, keeping most of the profits for themselves, a tight lid must be kept on this theory. That is why they spend so much on advertising, making the media almost totally dependent on them for their economic survival. That is why they supported Bush at all costs, to get a corporate, conservative Supreme Court to issue this ruling.

It is absolutely in their interest to keep the public flailing away at this religion or that sensational bit of magic or the prospect of UFO invaders or anything else to distract from one very basic, indisputable set of facts.

There’s no such thing as ghosts.

You can “believe” it ’till the cows come home, but that don’t make it true. You can swear you saw it, you “know” it, but you can’t prove it.

The only thing truly evil thing in this world is the absolute fact that the vast majority of people on planet earth are poor and uneducated, and it is in the interest of the few “haves” who own just about everything to keep it that way.

Anybody who has to work a normal job to make a living who votes for a corporate Republican or Democrat who gets most of their campaign money from oil companies, big banks and insurance companies, is not voting in their own self interest. That is a fact.

Abortion has been used more than any other social issue to keep votes rolling for the Republican Party, even though everybody who is anybody knows it is settled law, even according to the Bush Supreme Court. It is not even in their interest to overturn Roe v. Wade, so they won’t. But they will continue to get people to vote for them by promising they will, just as they will bait people on other so-called “wedge” or “hot button” issues, like opposition to gay marriage.

Anyone who falls for it is being fooled, just as people were fooled into thinking the sun revolved around the earth in Galileo’s day — because that is what the Catholic church said.

It’s like a virus of information and the brain, what we in academe call a “meme.”

Now, finally to my main point.

Also on Facebook this week, I noticed there is still this trend on the part of people who joined the crowd calling themselves “conservatives” a few years back to take any opportunity to put forward any little soundbite to perpetuate the myth that “government is bad” on its face.

“The most terrifying words in the English language are,” according to a quote attributed to Ronald Reagan: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

My question is: How does any idea like that get so stuck in the psyche of so many people for so long, setting back human progress on so many questions for decades?

I mean, it is so pathetically easy to debunk — if people would actually think about it.

Now I can understand if people say that about the government of George W. Bush and “your doing a great job Brownie” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But the people who espouse the anti-government philosophy loved Bush. Maybe because his job as president seemed to be to prove once and for all that government doesn’t work.

But what about the people of Haiti? When they rebuild from the disaster of this massive earthquake that killed at least 150,000 people, do you think they will be thanking corporations for coming to their aid?

For just one example, what was ExxonMobile doing while the rescue in Haiti was going on? Spilling 450,000 gallons of crude oil off the coast of Texas, that’s what.

Somehow we’ve got to get accurate information to people to debunk these simple little myths that keep people voting against themselves. Talk radio is clearly not the answer, and newspapers and TV news are too far gone down the corporate road.

The only thing I know to do is to continue building the Web Press, and sharing the links on Facebook, hoping enough people will click on the links and read the information and digest it — and get the point of it in time.

As the hillbilly moon shiner in the cartoon Barney Google and Snuffy Smith always said, and Johnny Cash sang, “Time’s a waistin’…”

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Tags: Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Biophilia, Dangerous Thing, E.O. Wilson, Facebook, Imagination is a Beautiful, Johnny Cash, Sociobiology, The Awesome Power of the Human Brain, The Web Press

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Corporate America, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.