I get exactly what you're saying but that misses the point which is it was just a load of tosh. If one[1] have something to say but can't say it clearly, one is wasting everyone's time at best and at worst become part of the problem.
[1] It's a shame that 'one' has dropped out of use in this context, it does sound so absurd and archaic, but 'you' can be mistaken for 'specifically you' so I hope one will forgive me here.
I’m a scientist with an increasing interest in how ideas form and which ideas establish dominance over others. The writer of the parent comment generally has rather interesting points to make on this topic, and I don’t recognise your vehement criticisms of either the language used or the points made.
Some of the comment in question very hard to make any sense of, e.g:
>Rather, they should be getting ahead of the story, and should pick on, oh, I don’t know, the greens, kick off a rumour that they’re a Masonic cabal of drag queen drug lords and make them defend it, and drag the Tories into that mess. The crazier and broader the accusations the better - grapeshot gives a lot of holes to patch, and distracts from the one which hit below the waterline. Play it right and you make everyone remember that it was the Tories that started it, as labour smearing the greens makes no sense. Punching up and doing minor damage makes you look weak and petty, punching down and demolishing an innocent makes you look strong. Children understand this - the world is a schoolyard.
Multiple parts of this make no sense, but one thing that stands out is that it doesn't make sense for the Tories to pick on the Greens either.
I recommend Bernays’ “Public Relations”, and “Propaganda” if you’d like to understand what I’m raving about, and why it would be strategically sound.
It isn’t necessarily about what makes sense, in a rational and deterministic fashion, rather what the stochastic outcomes of an action are. When you’re dealing with mass sentiment, the right move is often deeply counterintuitive, and you have to pretty much be a sociopath to execute adroitly. Demagoguery is a case in point of the veracity of this.
Are you then writing only for people who've read those books? If so, HN seems like a poor choice of forum.
I think, however, that you are redirecting because you aren't in fact able to explain how it would help Labour to spread crazy rumors about the Green Party. The Greens have a single MP. To a first approximation, no-one cares about any scandal involving the Greens – even if the scandal is true. If anything, it would make more sense for Labour to attack the Greens than it would for the Tories, as very few voters vacillate between the Tories and the Greens.
Well, it's not ideas, it's language abuse I'm griping over. Is "the alchemy of mind control" a helpful term in any way?
Wouldn't "as long as the techniques of narrative control remain the domain of the elite..." be better expressed as "while the elite use misinformation..." and perhaps ask what it is about the plebs that they'll accept being played? (if they are, which is semi-contentious).
Curious, on which specific interesting points are you referring to.
> Is "the alchemy of mind control" a helpful term in any way?
Maybe your criticism is less about this writer than about the imprecision of written language as a communication tool generally. In which case, bear in mind firstly that the writer is writing a quick post on a forum, not for a scientific journal. Also that imprecise language may seem imprecise to you, but may encapsulate broader meaning for others. Alternatively, a particular piece of writing might just poorly transmit meaning which itself is valuable. For example, I find Slavoj Zizek to be incomprehensible. But when he is well edited or I have read secondary texts, I have found his insights to be revelatory.
> Curious, on which specific interesting points are you referring to.
One of the common features of the ideas I mention is that they often garner an aggressive response, as people rightly dislike the idea that they’re enthralled by storytelling - but yet we are - it’s how we explain everything from the universe to other people, and likely originated with nascent theory of mind, sociality — lying.
So within us is the ability to sculpt narrative, to essentially deceive through attention manipulation or information selection, and also the response to that deception (anger, denial, pushback) - as they’re cultural ying and yang, the immune response and the illness.
It drives war when opposing stories clash, so great is the response that the wrong story, of which the story of stories is absolutely one, can evoke.
Anyway. I expect to be disagreed with. I may well be wrong and suffering under my own illusions - but my lived experience is that a good story is everything human.
> people rightly dislike the idea that they’re enthralled by storytelling
The fictitious narrative of free will could be the most potent narrative of all.
> but my lived experience is that a good story is everything human
I’m interested in the mechanisms by which narratives are conjured and mind control (this is too crude an expression for my liking but I don’t yet have anything better) asserted. Use of rhetoric, in combination with written and visual media are very powerful. This is well known. But the most powerful narrative web I believe can be created through the mechanism of introjection, where we don’t question our actions because this is simply what we see everyone else doing.
My underlying interest, I think, is the nature of reality. Peeling back the fictions of our own creation is a necessary ongoing part of that investigation.
[1] It's a shame that 'one' has dropped out of use in this context, it does sound so absurd and archaic, but 'you' can be mistaken for 'specifically you' so I hope one will forgive me here.