Wokeness and The Magic of Words
Media Ecology, The Price of Propaganda & The Inevitable Ends When Narratives Fail
In the years before WWII the media environment in Europe was a pandemonium of propaganda swirling between communist and fascist narratives largely disconnected from reality. Much like America following the assertion by Kelly-Ann Conway, that there are alternative facts, and its descent into the narrative wars between Fox and CNN, Europe in the nineteen-thirties was sense-making chaos.
Wireless Radio, a revolutionary mass communication technology, elevated charismatic and extreme voices, much as social media platforms have done in the modern era. This threw Europe into a crisis of competing truth claims and reality assertions. Extremists fought for the allegiances of the public as ruthlessly as bitter parents fight for the minds of their children in the worst kinds of divorces. Neither in the case of the children of abusive parents, nor the case of citizens of a propagandist state is wellbeing part of the calculus.
The collapse of sensemaking in the 30s followed the decades of yellow journalism. In America, the tabloid wars between dueling empires of fabulist media moguls, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer was a competition for newspaper sales driven by sensational lies. Hearst was famous for his explicit bias, once telling a correspondent he’d sent to Cuba who protested that there was no war to cover, “furnish me with images, and I will furnish the war.” In this spirit, indifferent to honesty and humanity, the only truths that could be arrived at reliably by the thirties in Europe, and particularly in Germany, which was deeply entrenched in a narrative civil war, was that the information environment was badly polluted, teetering on collapse and everywhere there were lies.
In the middle of this, in 1933, Alfred Korzybski published “Science and Sanity” the founding document in a field that became known as General Semantics. In it he explored the relationship between the words we use to describe the world and reality itself. He makes explicit distinctions between the surface structure of the words we use, and the deep structure of the things we are trying to communicate about. He argues that meaning of words and the reality we are attempting to convey can easily diverge.
In the writer’s model, the deep structure of reality is fundamentally beyond our capacity to express, constrained by the limits of our senses and of our words to represent our thoughts and perceptions. He shares views with classical philosophers about the difference between the manifest world we live and Plato’s domain of Perfect Forms. Concepts about a more profound reality are found in Eastern philosophies that point to a reality beyond words, beyond the gateless gate, in the infinite domain of the ten-thousand petaled lotus. Perhaps he also points to the same boundary that Wittgenstein arrived at a decade before, “that whereof we cannot speak, we must consign to silence.”
Korzybski gave us the term: “The Map is Not Territory,” which the philosopher Alan Watts translated in his humorous way decades later as, “The Menu is not the Meal.” In the fifties and sixties, writers and artists like Huxley, Kerouac and Kesey, toyed with the idea that we are separated from actual reality by the delay between this Deep Structure and our sense of it. Fueled by Benzedrine, Mescaline, Psilocybin and LSD, some of these culture-makers tried to close the perception gap and enter the pure moment, “The Now.”
If we could only eliminate the delay between light reflecting off an object, the time it takes to travel to our eyes, to move through our optic nerves, to be assembled as coherent images in our subtle minds, we might attain what the Buddhists call Enlightenment. Foolish and vain perhaps were those Beats and Hippies, and not a little speed-addled, but they understood that there is a difference between our internal representation of the world and The World Itself; they understood that our attempts to describe the world in words falls short; that words are clumsy tools and feeble attempts to arrive at a truly shared reality.
The map is not the territory. Words are not the things they represent. You can’t sit on the word, “chair” nor upon the sound “chair,” it is simply a symbol for a thing. Likewise, you can’t eat the menu. It’s not the meal.
Postmodernists, The Woke, however have turned this on its head. Their assertions of social constructionism and language are more comparable perhaps to neo-magical superstition of hippy Aquarianism of the 60s; that we each create our own reality. Far from dayglo and peacenik fancies however, like twisted manifestations of concepts in the new age bestseller, “The Secret,” the Woke view the world created by language as a dark and oppressive dystopia that must be redefined.
These primitive notions of words or actions having the ability to influence reality were described by Sir James Frazer in his classic, “The Golden Bough,” and in the rituals conducted by occult revivalists and Alchemists with their alembics, like Aleister Crowley and members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, did at the turn of the twentieth century. They believed in magick spells and that words themselves create reality.
The beliefs that words, symbols or rituals can create the world are primitive, childish bargains with spirits, exchanges of effort and action dedicated to the gods to create the outcomes desired by people seeking those boons. If I speak these magical words, if I sacrifice this goat, then God will grant my wishes. But playing with magic words and spells to create or influence the gods, and reality itself is a dangerous bargain. In more philosophies and legends than not these deals with the devil are conducted in currencies of the soul itself. The theft of magic by the unworthy apprentices, unleashes a chaos that cannot be contained, and only in Disney is the thief redeemed.
Our information ecology today is a hot crucible of narrative elementals. The reality that authoritarian woke wordsmiths are attempting to forge is based on the belief that reality, that public consciousness, is nothing but narrative. They impose their ever-shifting reality redefinitions and traffic in fantastical claims that we live in a country that is fundamentally racist, that white supremacy pervades our institutions, that certain identity groups should be held accountable for their stolen privilege. These are chants and incantations of spellcasters imposing a false reality. They tell us that there is no such thing as a woman or a man, but words make us so; they install these beliefs into the minds of babes through public education and then demand we conform their bodies to etheric identities with potions from labs and in the surgical theaters of Frankenstein madmen. These narrative ingredients cannot be combined into the strong and stable alloys of a healthy society, they are chemically incompatible.
These alchemists believe that we’re malleable to the pounding of lies by those who wield the weight of influence, who hammer reality into their desired shape with dark implements. The harder they manipulate words to fit their ideals, the farther they take us from the deeper structure of reality itself, to the point where words become meaningless, and perhaps as some fear, somewhere between the fire and the anvil, the stability of society itself will shatter.
The hour has come, and we must take back our language from these sorcerers. We are frighteningly far from reality with these false maps and stand at a desolate Herm where we cannot even correspond the definition of Woman: adult human female with biology itself.
At the beginning of the second world war, S.I. Hayakawa, a Japanese Canadian professor published his first works in the field of General Semantics, adding to the work of Alfred Korzybski in more accessible terms. In a series of papers known as “Language in Action,” he described how sense-makers, media, & propagandists use language to shape perception of reality and how, if we can understand language well enough to form an intellectual self-defense, we can protect ourselves from manipultions. It was published as a book in 1949, the same year as Orwell’s “1984” and gives in exposition and example the same warnings about the fallibility and corruptibility of words in the hands of authoritarians and manipulators as Winston Smith describes in Orwell’s fiction. Hayakawa gave us lessons learned from consequences about how we make sense of the world and how we are easily misled by weavers of narrative. He brought a Cartesian radical doubt to linguistics, “What do I know for certain?” and, “What CAN I know for certain?” He asks his readers to consider the difference between direct knowledge and what he calls extensional knowledge.
Direct knowledge is experiential, what we might call practical or even tactile knowledge. I know I am sitting in a chair. When I look in the mirror I have a beard, thinning hair and blue eyes. I am in an office in front of a computer screen. Direct knowledge requires no faith to accept in most cases. In the material world, the object world, I hear the hum of the furnace in the background and feel a change in temperature as it runs.
Extensional knowledge is knowledge we take for granted as factual that can be verified through direct experience. I have never actually seen the Eiffel Tower. I’ve seen pictures. I’ve heard stories. I’ve seen it in movies & TV but I’ve never been to Paris, so the Eiffel tower is only extensional knowledge to me. It is directly verifiable though by taking a trip to Paris.
Beyond this there are more and more abstract types of knowledge: theoretical, conceptual, and propositional knowledge. Let us imagine a spectrum of ease with which we form an accurate map of realty beginning at one end with tactile, directly sensed reality to extensional knowledge of places or people, then to abstract theoretical knowledge and into the domain of beliefs and opinions. We can imagine that if we have maps of reality created from direct experience, they might be high-resolution maps and the more we zoom out, through extensional knowledge, into theoretical, propositional types of knowledge, our maps become less and less reliable, like going from the google earth view of your own house, to the view of your community, to the view of the city, the country and the hemisphere.
I can know I am sitting in a chair in front of a screen but the farther away from my direct knowledge, and the more abstract a reality assertion is, the more extensional it is, the easier it is to create distortions and to manipulate perceptions of reality itself. The farther we are from direct experience, the more we must exercise discernment if we are to utilize this linguistic martial art that allows us to form the best map we can of reality.
I grew up with the expression, “don’t believe everything you see, and only half of what you read,” and today, with the corruption of our media ecology, the practice for many is, “don’t believe anything at all,” a reduction to Rene Descartes’ exercise of radical doubt which grounded him in the most fundamental direct knowledge that arrive at: “I Exist”
This begs the question: How do we shape our sense of self, our sense of truth in an information ecology polluted by grandiose lies and reality assertions that just five years ago we would have all called insane? Our media ecology, our government, our schools, and our economic institutions have disconnected from the simplest of facts, that human beings are sexually dimorphic, that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. How do we construct a coherent map of the territory when the institutions we have trusted to make sense of the world have disconnected from direct knowledge, skipped extensional knowledge and present fabricated and dissociated narrative as reality. What do we do when nice-sounding words like diversity and inclusion mean the opposite of what we once thought? When the Ministry of Peace is responsible for war; when the Ministry of Truth is the chief purveyor of propaganda for The State?
How do we recapture the power of language and come to an agreement about the basic map of the world that we share? Do we need to return to asking ourselves of every digital bit and soundbite that we encounter, “Is this True?”
Is it as simple as saying, “I am a human male? I have two arms and two legs; two eyes, ears and one mouth and nose?” How do we begin when the direct knowledge of our own biology is called into question by the public institutions responsible for cultural production, like universities, schools, governments, and media? How do we push back when policies and laws enforce false realities; when simple reality assertions about biological sex made by truth-tellers result in systemic gaslighting and reality denial; in investigations, in reputational destruction, in witch hunts?
Let us first perhaps begin to explore some new possible maps of the territory we’re collectively in. In the course of my conversations in the last year I have found the same as others seem to have found, that there are three patterns that seem to emerge in the life stories of people who are awake to what’s currently happening: They are narcissistic abuse survivors, people who have escaped cults, and people who have direct experience or generational memories of living in countries that fell to tyrants and totalitarian systems.
Many truth-tellers and activists recognize familiar themes. It frightens me how currently similar the patterns at the level of society are to the dynamics of the family I grew up in. To me the pattern plays out the same way an abusive parent often projects a positive but false image of the family to the world outside while they maintain a culture of secrecy within the family simultaneously through authoritarian abuse. In my home the false image was one of piety and religious devotion. My father was on the board of the church, donated generously, and stood in high regard in the congregation. We were there every Sunday, but we were only testamentary props in the narrative of family virtue. Few knew that we were often told to dry our tears on our way to church or choir or bible classes following the explosive, sometimes violent abuse our patriarch acted out right before leaving.
The family abuser lashes out at anyone trying to break the spell. The abuser often scapegoats their victims to destroy their credibility to protect the family secrets and their sacred narrative of virtue and goodness. He or she may narrate that the child being abused is mentally ill, has character flaws, is struggling, and is a liar. Other family members, know that dissent will not be tolerated and remain silent. Some as bystanders, and some as willing beneficiaries of abuse dynamic. Some may be familiar with this as addiction pattern dynamics and the roles people play in dysfunctional systems: The addict/abuser, the target/scapegoat, the golden child, the enabler, the lost child. All of this is held together by authoritarian control to protect the abuser’s false image of virtue, piety, and beneficence.
The family abuse dynamic, mapped in psychology as “Family Systems Theory,” is the same pattern that manifests in toxic work and social environments at scale. Workplace bullies often impose a false identity narrative of virtue, leadership, competence, and entitlement while simultaneously being exploitative, coercive and manipulative of their targets. Nothing that exposes their flaws or weakness can be tolerated. People who play along with this are rewarded by the tyrant. They advance in the system by enabling, or even perpetrating abuse against others as stand-ins for the bullies. We know these proxy abusers as flying monkeys. People who object to the exploitation and abuses of power evident in the system become the targets and scapegoats, not coincidentally, these people are often the ones being exploited, intimidated or bullied, or the ones defending the victims of the abusers.
Based on the maps we have of how this system plays out, consistent testimony indicates that the first step to solving the problem is to recognize it exists. Neither the abuser, the addict, the tyrant, or the totalitarian system has any benefit from seeing its own flaws and so it is incumbent upon the truth-tellers and the bystanders to the situation to name the problem and begin to set boundaries against the abusive power structures that control the systems. It is the fortunate organization that has the leadership which can exorcise these costly and toxic patterns and people from their environments. Too often the abusers and bullies are able to maintain the veneer they desire to project, while painting their targets as disruptive, troublemakers and malcontents. The system cannot be changed from within.
Survivors need to create new maps of reality, they need to escape the narrative imposed by the abusive parent, the office bully, the abusers of power like the media, the moguls, and the bureaucrats. We need to change the narrative, to illuminate the false maps of reality imposed by the abusers upon their victims.
Once I realized that I had grown up in an authoritarian cult, I realized I needed to reject the narratives of shame, guilt and limiting self-image imposed upon me by my abuser as a child. When we examine the woke narrative, the dark pessimism about white supremacy, assigned guilt for unearned privilege being made upon white kids, the conspiracy theory about the white patriarchy inventing racism, and heteronormativity and transphobia we can see that like in any authoritarian system, from family units to mass formations, the structure is the same: abuse is hiding behind a virtue narrative. In this false narrative we see all the same players at all scales: We see the abusers, their targets, their enablers, the bystanders, the allies and flying monkeys and their cause to claim virtue, the so-called oppressed classes whose victimization the tyrants embellish in narrative to justify their seizure of power.
The reality is this is all a social construction. It’s a false narrative that serves only the abusers and those seeking power and serves neither the so-called marginalized and oppressed nor the so-called privileged. The whole system is dysfunctional.
In the 80’s and 90s a set of ideas came into public consciousness thanks to people like Steven Covey and Anthony Robbins that the words we use “frame” our perception of reality shape our experience of reality. It was an idea that our beliefs and our consequent choices themselves more than anything else determine how we engage with the world and how we move through it. Those beliefs, often unconsciously held or presupposed about the world, determine our choices, actions, and behaviors, and combine to create self-fulfilling prophesies. It is true that many of these beliefs are socially constructed, in the case of my own family of origin, scripts about my nature, my capacity and my character were imposed upon me by a narcissistic abuser and were beaten into me. My abuser had a different narrative about my identity than who I actually am. The words and the deep structure were incongruent.
It’s easy to look at a family and say clearly, when a parent beats a child, berates them, tells them they’re worthless, stupid, selfish, guilty, greedy, and incompetent, that they will internalize this; its uncontroversial to call this psychological abuse.
Abuser narratives shape our identities in the same way collectively as they do at small scale. It should be easy to see and to say that when children are taught divisive identity politics rooted in Critical Race Theory that they are being given similar narratives and are internalizing these negative scripts about themselves. It should be easy to identify that the imposition of guilt for sins that happened generations ago, if they even happened in the way the woke narrate at all, is psychological abuse. It should be easy to say that teachers teaching minorities that the world is stacked against them, and they will always be fighting against oppression and racism are imposing limiting beliefs and models on children too young to know different, and that this is abusive. It should be easy to say that teaching children that they are inescapably their group identities, and we should view others based on their group identities is a way of teaching prejudice. The deeper structure of the word Prejudice is Pre-Judge and that teaching group identities in fact teaches racial stereotyping which we know from the maps we have of history only serve to divide people.
The abusers will always play the same games when their false narratives are exposed to scrutiny. They will attack their critics, the scapegoats, the whistle-blowers and the double down on their targets, using criticism they face to justify their actions. “Look what you made me do!”
At scale these patterns form along the same lines as in family systems. This map of reality scales from small systems to large institutional ones and if we want to come back to more accurate maps of our reality, we will have to examine our scripts, our collective beliefs and we will have to begin with some basic questions about reality itself. We need to change the childish and simplistic narrative about race and the tides of human movement to North America over centuries, and we need to replace it, and reframe it with a broader view of the world – one that integrates groups in our society instead of disintegrates society itself.
We need to take back some of the narratives and questions of reality imposed upon our children.
How do I “Identify?”
Am I a victim, helpless against the tides of history? Is my life fated to the status of my birth? By The color of my skin? By the kit beneath my kilt? Am I just a nameless member of a group, destined to the future assigned to me at birth? These are the pathetic beliefs of the resentful, the contemptuous, the sour-grape lazy.
Through the empowerment movement we grew to understand a layer of our deeper structure and it became common parlance for a while. We learned how each of us has a self-conception of who we are and what we’re capable of - sometimes functional, sometimes limited - and we learned that there was a way of not only understanding of our own personal myth, our own narrative structure, our linguistic programming, we could change it. We also learned tools to rewrite our lives, to create better futures and that in many ways, the falsely constructed narratives imposed on us can be revised. We learned that this isn’t magic or superstition or religion. It is a method and a process that begins with a simple question: what do we want?
One of Steven Covey’s great aphorisms, “Begin with the end in mind,” is reminiscent of a Buddhist expression, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Both wisdoms suggest that direction and action combine to take us where we want to go. They spend no useless words on complaining about the past, nor any wallowing in self-pity about the present.
It is insufficient to sit on one’s complaints about the world, to chant mantras of blame, to gyrate in self-loathing and collective self-flagellation. If we don’t like where we currently are, bound in the postmodern narrative of misery, oppression, exploitative power structures; cowering in circular self-talk and ruminations about why life is terrible, teaching this helplessness and victimhood to children in schools, the only courageous thing to do is to articulate a better future.
Let us begin by turning to a blank page and asking some basic questions. Who are we? What do we want? What kind of society do we want to live in?
Our journey towards creating the world we want begins with a liberation and an expansion of our language, an aggressive push-back against a culture and a false narrative that has entrenched itself in our institutions. These are now subversive acts and there is a growing underground movement around the world. Quiet groups and small zooms of people, perhaps like the tea rooms of the prohibition, like prayer circles held in secret by members of banned traditions in times of crisis. Because for all the language of wokeness, the deconstruction of oppressive language categories, the diversity, the equity, and the inclusion, we are in fact narrowing our linguistic landscape, entrenching fixed conceptions of our identity, and homogenizing our capacity for creative expression and thought. This is what authoritarian abusers do.
Terrence McKenna, famed ethnobotanist and psychedelic pioneer said: “Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness. And this plot prosecutes its goals through the limiting of language. Language is the battleground over which the fight will take place because what we cannot say we cannot communicate”
Our path forward begins with a re-visioning first of our own individual self-perception against the backdrop of what it means to be human – the gestalt of figure and ground, of ourselves and Anthropos. It begins with a re-articulation of our identity and of nature as a rejection of the one imposed by the collective narcissism of the woke. We need to push back at the narrowing boundaries of acceptable language and speak plainly. We need to expand our narratives about the world and what we can collectively make of it beyond the impoverished idea that we are solely and unforgivably a genocidal, oppressive nation of white supremacists, to one that encompasses the arc of humanity itself, from the dawn of consciousness to the dropping of the atom bomb. We need to envision a just future for all people without instantiating social policies and attitudes that look much like they’re based on the vengeance and primitive eye-for-eye justice ideologies of small-minded people.
Those small-minded models of humanity are what the leaders of the empowerment movement would call self-defeating scripts and limiting beliefs about us. As a society we need to come up with better self-conceptions, ones that frame our collective identities as evolving, growing and constructively transcending problems of the past AND ones that give us the ability to examine our present faults honestly and to course-correct on an ongoing basis. We need to get beyond those patterns that narcissists impose, playing one child against another, playing one colleague against another, playing one race against another.
Social media platforms have given voice to the worst human impulses. It is a pandora’s box that we opened fifteen years ago and only now, as a generation raised on it is stepping into adult roles, with social skills learned in environments that widely reward abusive patterns of behavior, is the tempest rising. Unlike when radio technology gave platform to hateful voices who played in-group-out-group games with the populace leading to global war and social collapse, social media unchecked has given voice to not just a few tyrants, but to a distributed mob seething in resentment and animosity. The product of this information environment is outrage and somehow, we need to figure how to build a digital civil society before, like in so many times passed, the accumulated resentment and the degradation of the information ecology will tip us into social collapse.
We need to stop comparing ourselves to billionaires while feeling unjustly discriminated against because we don’t have super-yachts and private jets; we need to compare ourselves to the lives of our grandparents two and three generations ago and be thankful. We need to compare our present society and ourselves and the things we take for granted to the 95% of the people in the world who have less resources and opportunity than we do today. If we can do this, perhaps we can recognize the power we have to fix the mistakes we have made and overcome the obstacles of the present constructively. If we cannot, we might end up having direct knowledge of the kinds of struggles our grandparents and great grandparents had to endure; we might end up falling backwards from the wonders of a society at the leading edge of human progress, abundance, and comfort, into the maw of chaos again.
Viewing the world as unjust and oppressive while seeking redress or viewing the world as having flaws but being fundamentally abundant and evolving are just frames. Neither of these frames change the underlying reality, the deep structure of the world, but one expands our capacity for open communication about the state of the world and for problem solving, while the other, faithless and ungracious is a path to destruction. We need frames that expand our ability to examine problems from multiple perspectives to approach solutions creatively. One that shifts our view on the past, present and future and allows us to forgive instead of hanging on to perceived grievances of the past.
Unfortunately, we have well-worn maps of this territory from too many moments in history. We know where these roads lead us if we don’t change course. We have seen the outcomes of teetering and incoherent information ecologies before. In the chaos, tyrants seize power. People turn against each other. The darkness of the worst human impulses falls upon us.
When we have no coherent maps, we are lost. When we have no destination in mind, we are aimless. It seems in this moment of post-pandemic cultural stress, in the post-truth era where we can’t even agree collectively on some of the most basic aspects of our direct human experiences, that ideologues are seizing the opportunity to impose a false reality upon us, to socially construct a false narrative of their own moral virtue and of the sins of their targets – those targets are like the family scapegoats, from whom the abuser demands atonement by fiat and by arbitrary imposition. At scale these narrative sorcerers collectively wield power they do not comprehend. The spellcasters of CRT and ESG and DIE have made a Faustian bargain for this power, to create reality with their dark language arts, while those of us who understand these well-known maps of history, these patterns of deep structure, fear that the devil will come to collect his due.