Talking about and thinking about narratives isn’t just important today. It’s essential if you are to arm yourself with the truth and ultimately stand any chance of not being driven completely mad.
Unfortunately, the reasons that make critical thinking necessary, as we absorb and digest any of the information that constantly flows towards us, usually through the digital devices that we carry, are not just as simple as working out the credibility of sources, identifying the truth, or filtering out the rampant levels of views and opinion which have regrettably become the bigger part of the content of all news.
It is increasingly necessary to identify where names and the nomenclature or branding of ideas, approaches, systems and even recognisable activities have been deliberately changed with the intention to confuse. Usually to create the misleading idea, in our minds, that somebody is doing something or selling something to us that is completely new or specialised beyond our comprehension. Just so that they can gain advantage over us until such time as we have worked it all out.
Regrettably, the establishment – that’s government, the public sector and all the big businesses and money organisations that are actually running things – has reached the point where they change the names of everything, either to make more money or benefit themselves, or increasingly to give the impression they have stopped or moved away from doing anything that has been publicly outed as being wrong. But for whatever reason that’s important to them, they intend to keep on doing it anyway and believe they need to nothing more to cover it up than change the name.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Whilst it would be foolish not to acknowledge the power for good that some forms of digital technology and artificial intelligence have – in the right hands and when being used for the right reasons, the way that so many of us have taken the coming technical or AI revolution as read, and seem to have just accepted that many will no longer have jobs as a result, does illustrate the danger that we have become to both ourselves and to our own future. All because we don’t ask questions and simply accept whatever we are being told to believe – usually because it’s come from the voice of someone remote who we don’t even know!
The rather inconvenient truth that all those creating new terminology for whatever they control, are trying to control or attempting to regain control of; is that there isn’t much going on that’s genuinely new, as we consider life in the aspect of 360 degrees around us.
It is just made to look and feel that way.
Indeed, most of us would quickly grasp this, if we were to refuse to just accept the sales pitch and ask what they are selling us, what it will do and how it works.
This approach is applicable to method as well as to machine.
We would all be wise to take time to consider everything that touches our lives in some way, in terms of the pathways that bring it to us, how it works, who benefits and why those interests have brought them to us as and when they have.
Some would say ‘Oh it’s obvious!’
But is it really? And has it ever been?
Magic only works on us, when we don’t understand whatever is happening
Sadly, many of us are all too happy to accept the premise that what we don’t know can’t hurt us.
We accept that names, memes, keywords, industry terms and abbreviations mean that whoever is using them knows things that we do not. Usually making those people more knowledgeable and therefore powerful than we are, with a somewhat strange accompanying surrender to the misplaced idea that we should simply shut up.
Exploding the very dangerous myth about people who are considered to be experts and specialists, often in ways that are taken to mean they have universal understanding of everything, when they most often have been doing just one job; have studied more about the subject than us, and have been given a qualification by someone else who is actually just like them, is now becoming essential.
Not just to stop ourselves from being played like complete fools. But because the idiocy and self-aggrandisement that blankets so many of the people in positions of power, influence, control and that we therefore revere, are hiding behind the façade of terms we don’t understand, just to benefit themselves whilst all the time creating a very unhappy and unhealthy world that for us, that is never really going to work in our favour for as long as people like this have influence and control.
Dishonesty is regrettably rampant throughout everything that the establishment now does. Not necessarily because everyone within the establishment is dishonest. But because the way that normal people like you and I are being exploited, manipulated and used, so that those doing these things can benefit in some way, is simply now accepted as being the ‘normal’ way things work and therefore as being the done thing, for everyone.
Using and abusing others at any level is not ok. And as we find ourselves transiting a tumultuous period of inevitable change, one of the things that we should all be striving for to experience in whatever new world awaits us on the other side, is that lying, manipulation and the abuse of any person for any reason by another, just so that the abuser can become advantaged in some way, should be outlawed and treated as the horrible crime that it really is.
Adam Tugwell 