State Crimes Against Democracy - 2

As the old war college professor once said, "It is important to maintain a proper image when your purpose is to deceive the citizenry you seek to manipulate".

Of course our picture of reality is not normally represented by physical photos.

That kind of image is a subconscious photo produced by the mind of the person seeking to envision the reality, the target of the manipulation:

People's behaviors are largely regulated by social motivations and goals ... Motivations are the process that initiate an individual's behavior directed towards a particular goal, which is defined as the "cognitive representation of a future object that the organism is committed to approach or avoid" ... Motives and goals are focused either on desired or rewarding end states (approach) or on undesired or punishing end states (avoidance) ... For example, one's beliefs that another person is harmless may lead one to feel safe in approaching and interacting with that person in a positive way; a response based on approach-oriented motives or goals. Alternatively, one's beliefs that another person is threatening may elicit fear, leading one to avoid any interaction with that person or interact in ways that provoke confrontation; a response based on avoidance-oriented motives or goals. (These cognitive-behavioral mechanisms also underlie self-fulfilling prophecy, wherein one's motives, goals, or stereotypes directly influence interpersonal behavior in ways that tend to confirm, rather than disconfirm, preexisting beliefs ... )

(American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 53, Number 6, page 855). We engineer our lives as if we were in a NASCAR race, looking out the wind shield and upon seeing a crash ahead of us, we desperately avoid it as if our lives depend on it.

Even though life is not a NASCAR race, we avoid things that would disrupt our comfort zone, challenge our world view, or bring problems to our life.

In so doing we are sometimes actually endangering our nation, and by extension our own selves as expressed in our current lifestyle.

Scholars and the media should be less fearful of cognitive dissonance, since they are paid to get through the fog of war to show us the real picture.

Some professionals do overcome the fear with professionalism, and thereby do their duty to society:

With respect to alleged SCADS, there have been many whistleblowers who, rather than change their beliefs, chose instead to publicly expose the problems they encountered in their respective fields of expertise. In response to the U.S. government's official account of the attacks of September 11, 2001, hundreds of officials, academics, and professionals have publicly expressed their objections. Most recently, Brigham Young University physics Professor Steven Jones, who was forced into early retirement for his work analyzing World Trade Center (WTC) dust for evidence of thermite residue, an explosive used in controlled demolition, published several articles with his colleagues --- in the Open Civil Engineering Journal, the Environmentalist, and the Open Chemical Physics Journal --- countering several popular myths about the WTC collapses and findings of chemical energetic materials in the recovered debris ...

(ibid, ABS, In Denial of Democracy: Social Psychological Implications for Public Discourse on State Crimes Against Democracy Post 9/11, page 857). Jones, along with thousands of professionals and millions of citizens, knew that this was his call to arms, so he picked up his lab instruments and the pen hoping it would prove to be more powerful than the sword the propagandists in the government had.

He sacrificed his life, in the sense of his lifestyle as a tenured professor, and chose the selfless path his 'superiors' were afraid to walk down.

He would not live the lie, with the damage it was to do to his nation, as his 'superiors' did.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post is here.