They’re not awful people — they’re just programmed that way. ๐ What has got my interest today — as soon as I settle down from shooting someone else’s artwork a little later — is the difference between language programming — the methods we use to discern and invest meaning in symbols and their arrangements — and “scripting” which I think of as the ranting content overlaying the programming. These guys who boast, brag, cajole, and threaten and wind themselves up around violence and death belie their humanity when they ask for help, would that they would do it sooner!
Changing scripts may be easy — it’s what copywriters and poets do — compared to getting to the reception programming, but that’s where our battle actually exists. Everything else is surface noise.
The source of the inspiration for the above note:ย The Jewish Press ยป ยป Dead Gaza BDS Advocate Sought Israeli Medical Careย – 12/19/2013.
Early language uptake programming and scripting — methods in listening and cognition : environmental content filtered and signified — deserves a page, at least. ย I’m sure there are academic volumes written around the themes, but in relation to conflict, one wants as distilled and schematic a concept as possible.
Addendum
The poisoned and amplified focus on a broad array of targets, Israel foremost but much else with similar prejudice. This energy channeled into and expended on malicious thought is something humans do but perhaps in a fated way, a wild invented way, that becomes cultural habit.
I don’t know if the world knows to confront or, actually, delve into basic language uptake issues in relation to conflict.
It both delights and pains me to know that if you “Google” the string “conflict metonymy”, my blog shows up fourth on the first page of results. Unbelievable! What are the institutions doing? And what am I doing without funding?!
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This gets better with the behavioral definition of “backchannels” as opposed to a more symbolic words-behind-the-words : cognitive hallucination : emotion approach. Someone’s making good money looking into the meaning of “hmmm” and “uh huh” and I’m playing that old “glass beads game” with the gravity, weight, and stability of relationships between nouns.
We might get ahead of ourselves with computers, but that’s another line and a bit sci-fi, but for conflict attenuation, the earliest complement to the construction of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, i.e., programming on one hand and scripting on the other, seems to me where attention should go (and I would like to be included when the research money catches on).
So it goes (nodding to Vonnegut while nonetheless turning away from the New Old Now Old Lost and Far Out Left) and much preferring Everett’s reporting to Chomsky’s asserting.
Confession, also: I haven’t read Hesse’s Magister Ludi since college and haven’t a clue as to what I may have absorbed from it, if anything but the notion that symbols offer themselves to play and some players their work with evil designs.
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