Lie, Spin or Narrative? Yes! Ideology

I Believe Everything I Read,

After I Write It

Someone cares what I have to say. Disagreeing with me indicates the same degree of care as agreeing with me. Lack of care elicits no response. It is disinterested. It neither agrees nor disagrees.

I like to make noises. Whether pronounced audibly or the clicking of keys, noise is noise. I create plenty of noise. At first, I thought no one wanted to hear me because my noise is crazy. I do not want to hear crazy people either. With that, it makes sense no one wants to hear me. Then, I began to think no one wanted to hear me because I make sense. Was this when I lost my mind? Or, when I discovered it? If no one cares to hear what I have to say, it does not matter what I say. Crazy or cogent, no matter.

The opinions of people who do not care to hear what I have to say define my craziness. Conversely, those who happen to want to hear (there must be some because with every new enemy one gains the enemy’s enemies as friends and with every new friend one gains new enemies of one’s own.), determine my cogency.

Are the opinions of others to define the meaning of my noise? For others, yes. There is no other way. For me, it does not have to. Only I know my meanings. Everyone gets to choose the noises they make. All others get to choose to not react or react to noises. Just as I am one of all the others who has the same decision to make regarding the noises of all others. Depending on the outcome of that decision, nothing happens or a reaction is born.

Opinions when voiced or acted upon become, both philosophical and psychological projections; philosophically, as participation in an external reality, psychologically as the modification of an external reality to fit one’s self-concept, experience and motivations. What others know of me is no more or less than others know of themselves. I am as many people as there are others with an opinion of me. Yet, I am singular. I am your Other. You are mine.

There is not much to go wrong with philosophical projection. It is the simple acceptance of an external world and one’s ability to effect it and its ability to effect one in return. Psychological projection, a product of self-concept, experience and motivations, casts an infinity of significations upon the self-same reality. The number of significations outpaces the number of people assigning them. Self-concept, experience, motivations and time are not static. Emotions come and go; the projections of others influence, coerce, manipulate etc. us every waking moment from birth to death. No conscious human being makes it from beginning to end without variations in self-concept and experience.

 One cannot live beyond one’s experience. One can speak beyond it and think beyond it. Both represent fictions; the former is commonly known as untruth (the reason someone might exaggerate and generalize the negative to state, “words are lies” (this is a psychological projection of its author’s inability to speak truth become an effort to deny truth and destroy it for others in order to save the author from facing the impotence born of bad conscience. The author has a bad conscience; therefore, everyone has a bad conscience; therefore, all words are lies.  The author’s reality has been distorted by self-concept, experience and motivations in such a way that, in his mind, everyone must suffer their reality through the same delusion/distortion. His.)), the latter imagination.

Neither truth nor untruth is found in words themselves, but in their context’s loyalty to reality. A more accurate use of words would be, “all words intended to disguise reality or distract from it are lies”.  But that statement is too honest, too neutral. It does not support any Ideology (Unless honesty and neutrality are an Ideology, which we will soon see they cannot be.) In the 1990s and early 2000s this ‘all words are lies’ attitude was represented by the word ‘spin’. More recently, the word ‘narrative’ has become the standard. Both being smoke screens. They obscure the lie and have the added consequence/benefit of also obscuring the truth.

 A lie told enough becomes the truth. That is the lie. That which happens in reality, happens, regardless of one’s ignorance of it or lies told about it. A lie is a lie regardless of who knows it to be and who does not.  When a car hits a tree, a specific, real car hits a specific, real tree in a specific way at a specific time. All things that happen in reality happen in this way. The fact that someone cannot accept reality or wants things to be other than they are does not change the facts. It simply reveals that person to be neurotic, mentally lazy, agenda driven, Ideological or some combination thereof depending on motivation, mood and/or circumstance.

‘All words are lies’, ‘spin’ and ‘narrative’ are synonymous. They fall in to the same category. A dark and sinister category. A category the Ideologists cannot do without but will not mention by name except when psychologically projecting it upon any thoughts, no matter how cogent, of any person or group whom they oppose or opposes them. The advantage liars have over the lied to is the liar knows the lie to be a lie (This advantaged is lost when the liars begin to believe their own lies.).

 To protect the lie, it is necessary to change the words from time to time. In the 1990s, when the word ‘spin’ replaced the word lie, few people noticed; however, within a decade it had become commonly accepted for what it was: lie. Needing a replacement for the word spin, the word narrative appeared. Mysteriously, overnight, everything became a narrative. The message went out and the language changed. Soon, a new word will appear, but the intent will remain the same. The intention in all these words is to disguise the truth. The category these words fall under and exist to distract us from while at the same time doing its business is: propaganda; willful, organized and promulgated lie(s) told with the intention of replacing reality with a belief in a distorted and corrupted place-holder for truth.

               This process produces a din which attempts to drown out reality, distracts from truth and promulgates untruth in its own service. This is the realm of the Ideologist. Would it be fair to say, ‘all ideologies are lies’? Absolutely. There are no ideologies without the propaganda necessary to perpetrate and perpetuate them. Words can exist without lies. Lies cannot exist without words. Words themselves are not the issue. The intent in the arrangement (or derangement (I realize this is not a parallel.  It is, however, more to the point)) and use (or abuse) of words to create ‘narratives‘, propaganda, is the issue.