The Critical Thinking Movement | Metacognition for Radicals Myth Propaganda Credulity in societies is nurtured by ruling-classes. The ruling-class controls the media, and therefore public perceptions, and so in our case Americans happily get stuck in deceitful debates. -Guns – Myth narrative: “Violence is caused by bad people with guns” My favorite example of framing a narrative is the gun/anti-gun debate. Scientific research defines the cause of violence in societies using an evidence-based method. The ruling-class redefines the cause of violence in mainstream narratives to simply: Guns. Research shows that violence in societies overwhelmingly stems from economic inequality. Stats show that unequal societies are the most violent. Here’s the kicker: The overall wealth of a society is not a key factor, only the level of inequality. In other words, it is not a certain level of poverty that causes violence, but the level of social pressure inequality causes. Inequality reflects directly on domestic violence and violent crime rates. In any society, when people see that opportunities are being kept from them as a consequence of the greed of a few, they lose dignity, and for some that means losing empathy and control. Contrast that research with the contrived mainstream debate. Liberals say keep guns out of the hands of criminals, while Conservatives cite the 2nd amendment, and not a word of the root cause. Liberals and Conservatives are like the Punch and Judy of political debate. - Capitalism Myths Mobility, Self-Reliance, and Individualism = Myth narrative: “Ours is a fair system. Opportunity is based on hard work” The myth of economic mobility is normalized in public perceptions, so American logic is if people happen to be poor in such a land of opportunity it must be their own fault and they are blamed and vilified. The actual workings of accumulated wealth are equivocated to mean rather than the ruthless financial control of the ruling-class, somehow wealth comes through ‘self-reliance’ and ‘individualism’. The reality is however that only a very small % of the population move up or down from the economic class in which they were born. Americans are kept from an understanding of the true degree of inequality by a lack of focus on that issue in the media. See that at the foundations of ruling-class political narratives are full of equivocations. Because premises are always pre-framed and corrupt, when it comes to working-class issues, we rarely if ever get the whole truth from mainstream political narratives. -Militarism Myth narrative: “The U.S. is a humanitarian nation” The reality is that we are a military aggressor nation that spends close to a trillion dollars a yearly, killing in the range of 8 million people in wars of aggression over the last 50 years. ~t https://facebook/groups/642818085789837
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 00:27:43 +0000
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