h a l f b a k e r yQuis custodiet the custard?
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Two notions, overlapping venndiagramatically to an extent, one an auxiliary service associated with the necessary precondition of the other.
The preconditional idea: this is a consultancy service, aimed at the small p political sphere, the objective of which is to ensure that the perceived reality
of whatever subset of the population is relevant accords with the reality that the client wishes to exist within the collective consciousness of that population subset.
Here is a for instance: let us say, for saying’s sake, that you are a person of both means and questionable taste. You plan to build the world’s first global hypercolour rotating anthropomorphic cathedral next to a memorial to Katyn. A traditionalist plutocrat would of course use bog standard bribery and corruption to ensure planning consent is granted, and use his or her Masonic or WI links with the higher echelons of the constabulary/WI to ensure that any negative reaction to your house of worship is discouraged. However and alas, these are not the days for the traditionalist – the internet being what it is, mawkish dissent and crying eagle outrage will be liked all over Facebook, sparking a local-TV-attracting disgusted wrinklies sit-in orchestrated by Joanna Lumley or similar, leading as these things do to News At Ten opprobrium. This, with a near-gravitational inevitability, results in hot dog shit being forced through the letter box of your Marbella bolt-hole. Unacceptable. But then so is the alternative.
So what you need is a reality management consultancy, where groundwork is laid for the widespread acceptance of your proposal. A socio-sectoral analysis is carried out, and each sector is assigned a reality to be inculcated.
(1) The planning committee will be presented with and persuaded into agreement with the reality that granting of planning consent for your house of worship will be in the best interests of the wider community (social cohesion increased through cosy interaction of diverse social groups (pie charts used to justify), upward mobility through the gentrification that follows such construction projects (fictional examples of visionary South American urban regenerators)) and of the members of the planning committee themselves (hints at cash payments, trips to Marbella (note to Gracia: clean out the letterbox thank you)). (2) The local inhabitants are fed related, buttressing, separate lies: yes to gentrification, but yes also to rumours of moral and sexual impropriety on the part of any vocal dissenters, and yes also to the general notion of the incorruptibility of public officials. (3) The nation as a whole is presented with the project at first in an “and finally” news piece ho ho ho isn’t Bradford wacky but then following up with planted thinkpieces in the right and left wing press (oh ok and web too) about the overwhelming public support for similar follies. And so on and so forth.
Of course, the planning committee might have individual members who are wise to the machinations of your consultants, who will need to be gulled by way of counter-lies specifically tailored to that person's prejudices and assumptions. The risk here is leakage, between and intra-sectorally. This is where the auxiliary service comes in.
The Secrets Police are not “police” in the public safety, yes ma’am I hit him with my truncheon ma’am in the goolies ma’am thank you ma’am sense of “police”, more in the verbular sense, though they themselves are nouns. The job of the Secrets Police is to ensure that the carefully constructed concentric rings of realities (fictional or otherwise) do not interact or otherwise bleed into one another, as this would potentially result in the need for an expensive wetwork containment operation. How the Secrets Police go about this will depend on the context (inveigling, disguise, physical violence in or out of disguise) but they are essentially the Secret Service Detail for the reality created for each planning committee member, placing themselves between reality in the really real sense and the reality constructed in the mind of their assigned human.
I haven't seen the Adjustment Bureau but
http://en.wikipedia...e_Adjustment_Bureau
wikipedia synopsis uses //frozen in time// and //the Bureau uses ordinary doorways to travel instantly to locations many blocks away// and //teleport// [calum, Jan 23 2013]
Kaleidoscope Cathedral
Kaleidoscope_20Cathedral
Who could possibly object! [DrBob, Jan 24 2013]
[link]
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I do not know what the US equivalent of the various parochial terms in this post are but here is a guess:
global hypercolour:Generra Hypercolor
planning committee:zoning committee
Joanna Lumley:Nancy Regan
Bradford:Baltimore
WI:Army-McCarthy Hearings
truncheon:nightstick
goolies:cojones
News at Ten:News at Nine and/or Eleven |
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that first annotation should be an idea in it's own
right :) |
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Conceptually laden, leaded. Raisin Scones with uncooked goo. |
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//global hypercolour rotating anthropomorphic cathedral next...// admittedly the rest of the idea was coloured a bit by my reading that last word as "nest". |
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I don't get it. Great bowls, though. |
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yes, there is a beaniesque character to it. |
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It's basically brainwashed nietzschean antisociologists with glowing spinning eyes, and radio transmitter-receivers implanted in their inner ears, that receive treatment from infinitely recursive-antipsychiatrists for the received voices sent from the controllers who live back in time in neutrino broadcasting substations underground at the compression centre of the magnetic poles in the Earthly toroid, that communicate through this puppetry with the unsuspecting through the Internet using presumed aliases and say such outlandish and crazy things that anyone who reads only a segment of any of it is thrust back into the cognitive prescriptions of all sanctioned authority. |
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I was going to summarise the idea by saying that it is a slightly more granular version of the Big Lie strategy, with lies targeted rather than being one size fits all, and with a specialised service to prevent potentially conflicting lies from interfering with one another. But since I had that thought, I have read rcarty's summary and have to admit it is much better than mine. |
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That's getting into cognitive-lie lie-dissonance, which is really just a sort of simple to complex process depending what system of lies is used to determine the right course of action in terms of lie selection, and lie actualization. |
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who polices the minds of the secrets police? Unless the individual polices the reality as they are permitted to understand it then there must be people who bridge the boundaries. And these bridges would forever pose a threat, and require a third layer of policing, then nay, a fourth, then finally a fifth, like nesting dolls pointing to a final, granular police of truth, an individual who simultaneously knows the whole truth, but cannot, will not, question it. |
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Congratulations, you've just reinvented the
Republican Party. |
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Ha! Though I suspect that Romney could have done with the Secrets Police wrt to his 47% chat. |
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I wonder if this idea is, as rcarty and WcW allude, actually an analogue to the way in which yer average human can maintain their prejudices in face of evidence of the invalidity of those prejudices. For example, members of relatively closed religious communities tend not to have a favourable opinion of members of other religious communities (particularly if the closed community and the surrounding community separated only by relatively small but exaggeratedly important differences), until such time as the closed community member is forced by happenstance to interact with the surrounding community. In such circumstances, the nice member of the surrounding community is afforded exceptional status within the mind of the closed community member, with other exceptionals added on an ad hoc basis, none of which are sufficient alone – and in many cases, aggregated – to challenge the deep-lying prejudice against the generality of surrounding community. The internal Secrets Police permit the member of the closed community to refuse headspace admission to the fact that veneration of Mary aside, there isn't much to separate the Catholics and the Protestants. |
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What I suppose I have done is take this well kent phenomenon from the interior realm to the political realm, where defences cannot be inculcated with such strength, nor strengthened with such rapidity. Maybe there is nothing new here. |
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As far as the drugs go, the occasional rude Chambertin aside, I haven't been anywhere near anything of that ilk for about a decade. I do wonder though if the temporary skewing of perception doesn't become for drug users sufficiently interesting that they subsequently, and with or without the aid of more drugs, continue to seek to view the world in new and interesting ways. |
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I've simplified a lot of that down to discursive power. Some people really only have the image of concepts, others have some depth of knowledge, complex discursion has more power for those with depth of knowledge, and less for those with image of knowledge, who identify with those with depth of knowledge of their image, masses develop around those deep zones. Sometimes the depth is a stagnant morass of confusion and half-heard telepathic massages from the past, with bubbling ignitable gases that is replicated by the mass, usually coming from a nearby graveyard; a high stakes game wagering eternal souls on minds. People really only have their singular mind to lose. Once one loses that one is the image of a lost mind to the singular mind. |
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I had a thought that this service might be used as a treatment for the paranoid, a careful massaging of their self-constructed reality such that their worldview can be moulded into something less self-destructive/more useful to the military-industrial complex. |
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I think I saw this movie... The Adjustment Bureau? |
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This is just a long-winded way of describing lobbyists isn't it! |
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Yes and no. I realise that lobbying and paranoia are v much my hobbyhorses at the moment, but what I was envisaging was, ultimately, akin to lobbying, but rather than the usual "here is lots of cash, how about awarding us that contract?" approach that lobbyists take, the idea here is to construct for each target a comforting (and likely broadly fictional) reality that leads to that target following your clients' wishes. It's lobbying as storytelling. I suppose it's somewhere in between lobbying, confidence trickery and public relations. |
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Distressing a thought as it is, I think you are selling lobbyists a bit short. The secret of the black art of lobbyists is that they construct a plausible reality that their potential patron can convince him/herself is for the general benefit, whilst portraying any alternatives as potentially harmful. The personal financial rewards are put up as a fortuitous additional bonus extra that tips the argument in their favour. |
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Maybe I give politicans too much credit: in my view the plausible reality constructed by the lobbyist is part of the dance of bribery but is, in reality, utterly unnecessary as each politican in power is fully aware of his or her reasons for pursuing an agenda that furthers the interests of the most generous lobby, and is also sufficiently experienced to know that self-deception is less effective a moral balm than the conventional vices. At best, the lobbyist is, as you say DrBob, an enabler of self-deception. What I have proposed is a managed system of externally-wrought deception (though one that might, at each level's week points, rely to an extent on self-deception, admittedly, yes). Finer shades here, I suppose, and maybe not much of an idea. Really, though, the main thing proposed is the Secrets Police, which is probably better meat for a story than for the halfbakery. |
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