The Daily Cognitive Discord—George Orwell Spins

On Economics, Healthcare, Coopting Language, and Paradigms

by Heidi Stevenson

6 September 2009

In this modern world, perception is everything. Spin it right and things will go your way, but only corporate quantities of money can finance this sort of control of public impression. That isn't hyperbole; it's how the world is run. It is, of course,unsustainable—but so is everything else in the modern world.

A New York Times headline reads, "In Unemployment Report, Signs of a Jobless Recovery". Try wrapping your mind around that. How can the words jobless and recovery be placed side-by-side like that? How can an economic recovery be jobless? What's the definition of an economic recovery if employment, most people's means of survival, isn't part of it?

We all read such headlines without blinking. I'm no different. It must be that way, else we couldn't survive day to day. The dissonance would be too great. Survival requires that we make sense of our routine surroundings, so that they're internalized and it isn't necessary to continually put pictures of the world together from scratch. Otherwise, our minds would be too busy deciphering to be able to respond.

This is the secret of marketing, and marketing is the open secret of our corporate masters. By controlling the meanings of everyday dialogue, control of the masses' thinking and even automatic responses are assured. Corporations own major media for this reason—to control the masses—and it's why that ownership is so dangerous.

It is pure hubris to believe that we individuals have the ability to completely separate ourselves from the constant bombardment of the media. It's virtually everywhere we go. From the time we wake in the morning—to a clock radio, perhaps, with its commercial messages? Or the advertising that bombards us everywhere we turn. The subliminal ads like product placements in movies. The branded prescriptions doctors write. The fears imposed by public agencies over a minor disease. The removal from everyday awareness of the great issues, like global heating.

Did that last term, global heating, jar you a bit? That's because we've been acclimatized to the softened term, climate change. The subject has been sanitized by a twist of words designed to lull the masses, separating reality from the language. Climate change is happening all the time; it's no big deal. Why worry about it? That's the problem, though. The real issue isn't climate change, it's how the world is heating up. It's about taking the carbon that's been safely sequestered in the earth and releasing it without any regard for effects that are surely destroying humans, along with most other life on earth.

Yet we blithely go about our days, vaguely aware that there's a problem out there, but lulled by the sense that modern science can fix anything, that we're somehow separated from and superior to everything else in the world. That's the paradigm that serves the bottom line of big business, which has the means and tools to give the appearance of a reality that suits their ends.

The daily cognitive discord, though, happens to have been disorienting to me lately. Perhaps my mind is unable to incorporate the conflict, is insistent on analyzing things well past the point that most people simply assimilate.

Remember "The Truman Show"? The lead character, Truman, unknowingly lives in a television set that looks like Leave It to Beaver's small-town America. He was literally born into it. The people who populate his world are actors. In spite of the fact that every aspect of his life is being exploited, life is just about perfect for him. But something just doesn't seem right. Truman steps back and starts looking at his world with a critical eye. He finds that things just don't add up.

I feel like Truman, but with one significant distinction: There was a real world outside his; he could escape. Truman's world was a subset of the real world. The modern world, though, has overtaken the real world. There is no escape.