Welcome to the weekend!
I don't know about you, but the sudden winter weather has been quite the pain to deal with. Was hoping for things to ease in a little more, however it doesn't seem like it's going to let up. We're just going straight into cold weather, it seems. What a pain.
That aside, let's get to it.
Today's topic is less about the contents of the above video in question (though not entirely) and about the great message included inside of it. Today we will discuss what truth in storytelling is supposed to amount to and how it can be used to dishonestly divert attention or focus by those who engage in it honestly. This is hard to describe so I'll try to e straightforward about it. Essentially, storytelling is truth telling, it is meant to impart reality on the audience... which is why it can be used to lie about reality instead. And there are countless examples of just that out there, especially today.
In essence, stories are powerful and are meant to present truth to both the teller and the audience, and it takes a special kind of deceiver to weaponize that against the people who are meant to be the audience. And deceiving is almost expected these days.
To sum it up: stories might not be obviously true on a surface level but they are always meant to be epistemically true. When your audience sits down to listen to you at the campfire, they are expecting a true story. If they're not it's only because they've been lied to so much they are skeptical by default. This is not how it's meant to be, but storytellers over the past century have deliberately soured the relationship with their audience due to the antisocial crowd in charge of the large industries. And now stories are seen as completely disposable and throwaway.
So what does it mean to be epistemically true and how did the subversive crowd lie about it? That is a bit complicated, but the long and short of it is that they didn't just outright lie to audiences: they told the true . . . to a point. They used the truth to wedge themselves in to present lies as truth. The way this is done is quite interesting. This process means that storytellers can focus on part of the bigger picture that is True while ignoring the whole, thereby lying by omission and manipulating those they see as beneath them. The thumbnail topic in the above video about the "Satanic Panic" is one such issue that is still bandied about today.
Before anyone rolls their eyes and starts smugly typing their expert opinion, it might be wise to ask why this is being brought up at all in today's topic. The reason is that the "Satanic Panic" is a media buzzword used to distract from the epistemic truth in order to frame a different lie as reality instead. Let's get into how that works.
For example, when one tells a story about how crazy it is to think of Dungeons and Dragons or metal records are satanic, they deliberately ignore the real issues of the time period to frame the entire thing as one large canard about the former subjects instead. This why you were taught to hear the phrase "Satanic Panic" and dismiss everything related to the subject. You won't learn who Ralph Underwager, Gary Caradori, or Marc Dutroux are, or why they matter, but still consider yourself an expert on the subject because your silly out of touch grandma took away your Pokémon cards a quarter of a century ago. You don't know what the Franklin Scandal is or why the Finders not being a one-off project is significant, but it doesn't matter because Tom Hanks was in a silly Dungeons and Dragons is Evil movie back in the 1980s. This is how an audience can be manipulated.
And it still carries on today.
This process of lying by omission is an appeal to emotion using massaged facts in order to avoid considering a larger truth. But this is only part of it. This whole mechanism prevents a sort of epistemic investigation of the larger project, a form of propaganda made to stunt thinking. In fact, it's the most effective kind of propaganda there is, because it it isn't straight out lying: it is using a piece of truth to cover the bigger picture. It is the worst kind of manipulation there is.
Let me explain further, using a similar example we still hear plenty about today. This isn't meant to be directly political, but since it involves political decisions that changed an entire industry, it's unavoidable.
Why does no one ask why Bill Clinton's Telecommunication Act of 1996 enabling Clear Channel to rise and Al Gore's wife persecuting an entire industry then lead those same people who had their careers directly harmed and industries gutted led to those same people to vote for them and enabled their destruction. How does one support those who directly harmed them without even a second thought or doubt? Where does that attitude come from? As we've seen, it did not fall out of the sky: it was constructed.
Why do supposed anti-censorship crowds today still obsess over the above "Satanic Panic" half truths while ignoring the existence of entire organizations like the ACT and people like Peggy Charren who broke the back of the animation industry in the west and eventually allowed Japan to eat their lunch? It's because they were told half a story and never investigated further, because it seemed truth enough, even though it wasn't actually so when one looks into it. The woman who gutted the animation industry and children's programming was awarded the presidential medal of freedom for doing so, and once again no anti-censorship soldier ever speaks on it.
Isn't that amazing? It really shows how effective half-truths are to outright lies, and it's why this has been the way it's been for so long. It's a winning tactic for subversives.
This is the larger point being made. These are all half truths meant to obscure a larger and more important Full Truth, and to this day there is a whole generation that consider themselves experts on all the above subjects despite not knowing half the story. This is by design. It's very diabolical when you think about how it's done. In fact, it's the sort of thing people increasingly hate journalists for today, because they only investigate half truths that look at a small piece of the picture due to being taught the larger one doesn't actually exist at all. Only their pet causes matter, not what led to said causes existing or what supporting them might lead to in the future. What are causes and consequences? They don't matter aside from the one narrow subject. After all, it's about Your Truth, not The Truth, and that makes all the difference. The Self comes before all else.
The largest issue with the 20th century was exactly this obsession with fragments at the expense of the whole. Investigation for the cause of half truths, not epistemic ones, and this lack of care for the whole is what lead to the alienated culture we live in today, and the loss of a high trust society and shared language and customs. We are currently living in the late stages of this way of thinking, and still repeating old half truths constantly to keep us locked there.
How do we get out of this? There isn't an easy answer to that. Much of this is simply decay and entropy not being fought against. Much like the so-called "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec, it's just a fancy name for moral laziness and lack of care for the wider picture. Unless decay is actively fought against and reversed, the state of things will not get better, and everyone knows it. Whether they accept this Full Truth or not is another story. However, it will change. Much like how the younger generations now think the status quo from the past quarter century is lame.
Here are some examples of this happening right now:
Whether you agree with the language or specific examples in the above is not quite the point. It's more that the younger generations are not as satisfied with half truths as ours were taught to believe wholeheartedly since the 20th century established its new reality as default. The younger generations know something is wrong on a deeper level and that the answer is to not shut up and do what those in charge say to do. Whether that is due to generations of broken promises and dead end thinking is to be seen, but the status quo will not continue on this way.
They want to keep digging for a better truth than the ones they were told to accept. This is going to lead to something quite different than the 20th century we've left behind.
If anything, this should all be an encouraging sign. Whatever we think is coming is probably not what is actually on the way, but it hardly matters since Truth always eventually wins in the end. Half truths and lies eventually fall away to the mists of time even if we don't care to discover them for ourselves. It just Is.
And after that? Well, that's when the real building begins.
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