selective amnesia
remembering what wasn't so: good politics, but lousy for the rest of us.
back in the era covidian, certain internet felines were heard to opine that as we all woke up from this collective madness, the switching of jerseys would be so intense and pervasive that pretty soon you’d struggle to find people who admitted supporting mandates and masking and lockdowns.
it’s just human nature. if the grandparents of even 50% of the frenchmen who claim that their grandparents were in “the resistance” actually had been, they’d have rounded up the wehrmacht and tossed it into the rhine without breaking a sweat.
all cultures have their myths and wubbies.
half the time, i swear people are not even aware they do it.
perhaps it’s cognitive dissonance erasing/modifying memories to avoid having to admit “i was craven and stupid and succumbed to gell-mann amnesia.”
i mean, who wants to remember cheering for (much less perpetrating) this or trusting media and politicians known to be untrustworthy?
collective guilt leads to collective amnesia. it’s why making sure everyone is complicit is the trick to skating off scott free for atrocity.
perhaps it’s “i was always with the crowd” so when the crowd shifts you just assume you were all always in the right as they now pretend to be.
this can certainly lead to “how we know what isn’t so.”
or maybe people just lie.
in the end, i’m not sure it matters.
but here is what DOES matter:
you all know how i feel about the reputation economy and the importance of its emergence into the modern agora.
the reputation economy runs on free speech and free information.
there can be no trustworthy knowledge without open data and open discourse.
anyone who seeks to censor seeks to break this.
and people say all sorts of things.
and people tell all sorts of lies.
and so we must assess and wrestle and winnow wheat from chaff and meaning from mendacity.
integral to this process are “receipts.”
so here are some receipts.
tally them up for yourselves.
It's called DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), and it's a favorite tool of philanthropaths, tyrants, and other narcissistic abusers:
• "How Narcissists Use DARVO to Avoid Accountability": https://www.verywellmind.com/protecting-yourself-from-darvo-abusive-behavior-7562730
"By denying their actions, attacking the person confronting them, and flipping the roles of victim and offender, the narcissist effectively redirects attention away from their own actions, often causing doubt in the victim's claims."
—Bayu Prihandito
Think about your own family: depressing. Really your own spouse, children, close friends, colleagues , how many malfunctioned, and how many are now lying about it? Memory hole, yes?
This is one consequence of propaganda; we live in a sea of lies and education is the starting point of the lies. Your children are being abused right now, or should I say disabused of honesty, it is called school. They’re being taught what to think not how to think. Is it any wonder that they are so malleable as adults.
But also readers of this author are a highly selected group. This is our thing we care about truth . Our author is a skilful interpreter of reality. Something like 95% of people are disinterested in honesty and generally figuring it out . They would not read this author. It is not their thing, they don’t care . It is our thing we care which makes it worse.