Language as a determinative of perception, attitude, and potential

 Cognitive dissonance is defined as a mental conflict that occurs when one’s beliefs don’t line up with one’s actions, an uncomfortable state of mind when someone has contradictory values, attitudes or perspective about the same thing. A smoker knows his habit causes lung cancer and still takes more and more cigarettes ‘to calm his anxiety.’ Some of the ‘adjustments’ to this conflict are rationalization decisions, avoiding arguments, concealing their attitudes/beliefs from others or even ignore medical advice. (abstracted from psycom.net)

Is it cognitive dissonance, when a nation, for example the United States, beats drums, blows trumpets and sings hymns to peace, while holding the largest and most technically advanced military arsenal in history? Is that ‘dissonance’ merely rationalized as “national security” in a dangerous world? Or is it, rather a form of self-deception that has been embedded in the national psyche as ‘normal’ and then propagated through various national initiatives like “Memorial Day” and “Veterans Day” and celebration of military training in elite academies like West Point? Dominance, in hard power, however, has other implications that tend to go ‘under the radar’ of the national psyche.

For instance, ‘top gun’ and ‘top rung’ and ‘star’ performances all trickle down from a culture that is obsessed with dominance. And, in order to be dominant, in any area, one has to simplify, ignore or rationalize all ambiguities, frame the universe in ‘rifle’ shots, while dismissing all nuances as distractions. Essential to all forms of simplification and reduction, is a language of literalism#, and nominalism* that comes to dominate the cultural landscape.

For nearly six years, the United States has watched, even obsessed over the words, actions, policies and attitudes and values of one individual who, for a time occupied the Oval Office. Observed and reported on from a variety of angles and perspectives, as narcissist, liar, manipulator, even conspiracy theorist and propagator, abuser, betrayer, misogynist, homophobe, racist, fraudster, tax-evader, mob-boss, tyrant-sycophant, performer/entertainer/salesman, media-ratings magnet and, for his cultist adherents, rock star and national saviour, superman. And whatever words have been deployed to depict and to analyse this person and his role and impact on American history, he has continually, consistently and persistently, dominated the public discourse, even much of the public mind.

Seeing themselves through the lens of this single human being’s performances, on twitter, at the podium, on the escalator, emerging from Airforce One, his ‘footprints’ have embedded themselves into the most heinous (and for some most heroic) projections that he magnetized from the collective unconscious across the country.

Slipping past and through attempts to impeach, to derail, to defeat and to rein in his most dangerous instincts, this single person continues to defy all entrapments even after spawning overt and covert insurrection and sedition, and has just recently declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2024. Lawyers for this historic and dystopic narrative are hired, fired, lied to, betrayed, imprisoned and professionally decimated and destroyed. Message merchants sign on only to awaken to their own innocence, ignorance and naivety, and then depart to tell of their transformative insight.

Having learned the secrets of “the deal” as a ‘developer’ in the ‘city that never sleeps’, this man has been engaged in a thespian drama of his own apprenticeship/writing/acting/seducing/manipulating for over three-quarters of a century. It is not only money and social status that are his obsessions; the real obsession/fixation is his insatiable appetite for attention and control. And, tragically, those legal laws and agencies constructed to prevent such persons from conducting business, politics, academics, athletics or any other enterprise in such a manner that he has ‘mastered’ have been inadequate to stop him. Learning and then enacting each and every loophole, escape hatch, delay tactic, subterfuge and deception known and available, this fraudster has apparently tricked the ‘system’ while exposing himself at the level of individual consciousness and perception.

(From britannica.com)

Apopis (was) the ancient Egyptian demon of chaos, who had the form of a serpent and, as the foe of the sun god Re, represented all that was outside the ordered cosmos. Although many serpents symbolized divinity and royalty, Apopis threatened the underworld and symbolized evil. Each night Apopis encountered Re at a particular hour in the sun god’s ritual journey through the underworld in hi divine bark. Seth, who rode as guardian in the front of Re’s bark, attacked him with a spear and slew him, but the next night Apopis, who could not be permanently subdued, was there again to attack Re. The Egyptians believed that the kind could help maintain the order of the world and assist Re by performing rituals against Apopis.

History has been confronting evil tyrants for centuries, through ‘rituals’ and through military conflicts, through criminal courts, assassinations, and yet the world continues to fail to rein in such men. The argument that both good and evil are inherent in each human, does not qualify as our shared rationalization for failing to bring these men to their own demise. The argument that ‘the establishment’ by definition is evil incarnate (or ‘woke’ or fraudulent or a cabal, or child-molesters or ….) is merely a projection from the one side onto the other, as a blatantly transparent transposition of the “attack hot-button words’ used by their enemies against them. The reliance on the legal definitions, requirements and procedures exclusively to bring this latest iteration of tyranny to heel, however, evokes and even prolongs more of the same kind of strategic and tactical manoeuvring on both sides that defies resolution.

And defying resolution, in order to keep this ‘game’ going, is precisely what this individual is determined to do. So long as his out-manoeuvring escapes the snare of the courts and the prisons, and thereby keeps him in the headlines, knowing as he does that his apprenticeship in voodoo sinister deception far outstrips the imaginations of those who have so far designed and written the laws to prevent such evil, this game will continue. Being one-step ahead of a legal system that moves more like a glacier (before global warming and climate change) offers timing opportunities that evoke images of pollywogs in spring streams.

And so, while the game unfolds, all of the inherent, unconscious, previously unleashed anger and resentments against all forms of order, government, constitutional democracy and its institutions from the hinterland is given not only ‘cover’ but actual seductive magnetic release. “There are good people on both sides” and “Proud Boys stand by and stand ready” are only two of the epithets of open encouragement even public recruitment of the forces of white supremacy, lawlessness and, in the light of conventional public order, anarchy.

Any argument, as has been delivered in the Vatican by people like Steve Bannon, that this presidency and all of the strategies and tactics it and its people deploy are aimed at preserving “western, Christian, white. European/American, culture” against the perceived enemies of immigrants, blacks, indigenous, Jews, and LGBTQ+ minorities, including those whose political and ideological interests, beliefs and attitudes support these ‘invaders’ has to be seen, considered and defined as malevolent, racist, sexist, imperialist, colonialist and tyrannical. And what’s more, the tentacles of the former occupant of the Oval Office, reach out to, and indeed attach themselves to other tyrants like Vladimir Putin who considers the ‘west’ to be his and Russia’s enemy. Similarly, Viktor Orban, in Hungary, has parallel attitudes and positions, as do other right-wing nationalist political voices like Marie LePin in France.

For the United States to deploy the Department of Justice, as well as the National Security and Intelligence institution, as their primary ‘forces’ in the conflict between an internal candidate for the presidency and his minions and his international apparatchiks, however, will continue to smother the mass media coverage, into their literalisms and their nominalisms and protract the tragedy. Public discourse, and even private kitchen-table conversations are saturated with the common sense “consciousness” and cognitive awareness that this person and his cult are a danger not only to the American democracy, but to the world at large.

And one of the risks in the way this drama is playing out is that, while the man and his minions continue to slip through the grasp of the “law”, they and their millions are growing increasingly vengeful, angry and unbalanced in their beliefs and perceptions of truth, reality and public order. Public bills to impeach Biden, for example, as Marjorie Taylor Green has already announced she will do on Monday, November 21, 2022, given the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, is only adding fuel to the fire of entropy inside the United States, while also contributing to the discombobulation of the wider world community as it fails to grapple fully, substantively and immediately with the ravages of rising temperatures everywhere.

There are several changes to the national project to derail this sinister, demagogic, anarchist threat and they could begin with a revision of the language/perception from literalism/nominalism to the archetypal/symbolic in both the media and the democratic voices/forces. The public is not only capable of making such a transition; it is being starved by not being offered its nuanced, abstract, ambiguous and numinous overtones. At the human level, each person is more than a widget of production/revenue/income/vote/cost in the social contract. And to consider this shift into a more full and comprehensive and yes, complicated, perception and identity of each person, including the former president, is to bring into the drama a more universal, less technical, (perhaps even less ‘woke’ attitude and perception) to the table.

We are not engaged in a simple truth-fiction conflict; we are engaged in a ‘literal/nominal/superficial/reductionist’ tension with a perception that sees beyond the view at the ‘wrong’ end of the telescope. Let’s turn the telescope around, embrace the wider and more complex and more nuanced and also more archetypal and symbolic inferences, not only in our own lives, but in the discussion, debate  and confrontation of our most intractable political issues.

If the insurrection, the various impeachments, and the continuing headline drama do nothing more than transform the cultural, linguistic and perceptive orientation of the nation, first, and potentially the world (given the potential leadership that continues to lie with the U.S.) from the minimalist, literalist, nominalist, reductionist, superficial to a more imaginative, poetic, archetypal, symbolic and universal language, attitude and series of actions, we might escape the kind of cognitive dissonance and its entrapments that hold sway on so many fronts.

The COP27 conference in Sharm el Sheik is said to be wrestling with words like “loss and damage” in the third world, from carbon emissions in the developed world, and the consequent responsibility on those developed nations to contribute to the costs of the “loss and damage” to those developing countries from global warming and climate change. Such an initiative has been for years resisted by the developed nations, to their own peril, given that the rising temperatures impact us all. Opening to perspectives free from cognitive dissonance is not applicable only to the derailing of another term of anarchy in the United States; it is also inherent in our conception of many of our shared issues, problems and threats.

Deposing, or bringing down, or removing Putin, for example, while it will likely only happen by the uprising of the people of Russia, could, nevertheless, begin by a legal case against him in absentia, for war crimes, invasion and crimes against humanity. Daily reports of a myriad of missile attacks on the infrastructure in Ukraine, can tend to overshadow more important, and perhaps less visible and less dramatic work behind the scenes on other ‘fronts’ of this war. Coverage of the bombs and missiles, however, should not be permitted to eclipse those important nuanced and diligent efforts.

We are and can demonstrate that we are creatures who need and deserve more than the fast-food of dramatic and sinister headlines, manipulated by those devious and weak enough to rely on both our permission of our own seduction and their insatiable need for dominance. We need to shift to more common sense, more poetic, archetypal and more symbolic and hence more integrated and connected and shared perceptions, on the political front, the military and national security front, the medical and legal front and the academic front.

Pigeon-holing issues, individuals and shared threats into manageable bites and bytes, in order to feel that we are more in control, is only another of the many shared cognitive dissonances, and poetic starvations, in which we are all living.

Surely, we are both stronger, more courageous, and more imaginative than to permit this kind of dumbing-down to be our intellectual diet. We all know that we are ‘starving’ in the metaphoric sense.

#Literalism: (from merriam-webster.com) is defined as adherence to the explicit substance of an idea or expressions; and fidelity to observable fact

*Nominalism: (From Oxford Languages): the doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality, and that only particular objects exist,; properties, numbers, and sets are thought of as merely features of the way of considering things that exist.