. . . religion may layer above other language-derived and driven social programming, so obtaining a reform with buy-in in any part may entail driving down into more deeply embedded thought processes and social procedures derived in relation to fetal and infantile listening and signal discernment.
Political and religious axis may present comparatively sophisticated “content scripts” — once we know how to figure out what’s important in our earliest years, we may then start learning more about our environments in language or as language cultures.
If we pick up a program rule, e.g., what happens in the family stays in the family, we may then bend speech to suit it. The example given and involving privacy and a common boundary where families are nuclear may be part of a near universal experience, but private relationships may also be deeply extended and some combine of other values enforced, including some having to do with loyalty and silence foremost, contempt for others close by, and concerns for good conduct and integrity nulled as regards outsiders.
I suspect the “cavemen” not so burdened by these considerations and, perhaps with the young like teens everywhere, more quick to assert themselves than to comprehend themselves.
A cultures laws, religion, and tradition may seem comprehensive and rich in design and deployment while actually expression less observed — for being omnipresent — habits of language and mind.
From the instant the fetus experiences sound, the organism has a pleasant survival-oriented task that it may attend essentially without distraction: our baby experiences . . . experience through the mother’s chemistry, his own, and through the ears.
We’re born listeners even if we may not seem to be listening while oscillating between gurgles and howls and sleep.
What’s in the air in the environment, whether sweet music or sharp tongues, the bang of explosions, the susurration or a breeze bothering leafy branches, gets into the head, and the match with language gets figured out as may relative social values and manners of use, what to say and how to say it when and to whom.
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Language as a behavior and narcissism as expressive of self-concept associated with language behavior provide two conceptual tools for taking apart the drivers in personality that energize and sustain the intellectual or content-rich scripts involved in speech in conflict processes. I would suggest that it’s the underlying language programming, which is of wild invention within a cultural “development boundary” — the edge of the tribal land — rather than the overlaid script that produces war when war, itself a behavior, is heavily dependent on ideas about cultural and personal realities.
Some settlers may not be perfect 🙂 I don’t know for the paucity of mainstream media or otherwise vetted journalists combing the territory and less weighed down with agenda channeled by a special interest press. The “Pallywood” and issues related involve a stepped concept: the belief that 1) information is power, and if that is so, then 2) power over information must be really powerful. That organizations would arm Palestinians with cameras for their defense but also do so in an environment in which baiting, false flag, and provocation seem a part of the atmosphere may well produce viscerally compelling images without necessarily telling a whole story. Accompanying the idea that “power over information must be really powerful” (let’s ask Putin what he thinks about that — and also what he learned on the way to becoming a colonel) may be the conceit that one is above it and others merely susceptible tools, especially if the information environment is pervasive enough and there’s a little something in the target’s heart (in my world: learned but forgotten messages gleaned during early childhood language uptake) that wants confirmation still of the rule embedded and unconsciously in suspension.
Much of the Islamic Small Wars as well as the ghosts of the Soviet Union persist in informational dark space. Neither Fatah nor Hamas have produced around them anything close to “open democracy”. http://www.cpj.org/tags/fatah-voice For all the bloodshed along the several axis coinciding in these so far small wars — autocratic, criminal (narcotics, arms running, kidnapping, extortion, other trade), and religious — much would abate with growing strength in integrity and perhaps greater insight into the cognitive mechanics of “malignant narcissism”.
The interpretation of the world in language – how one knows how to talk about the experience of life in a place — may be also reflective of language programming in the head. That programming is powerful, sufficient, certainly, to see in some fashion – or confirm with enthusiasm someone else’s observation — ghosts and witches in one century and to find the experience of either inaccessible in the next.
Autocrat, dictator, or totalitarian monster would wish his constituents (and everyone else) to see things his way.
Perhaps the little monster consign themselves to writing poetry while the larger ones erupt with whole political programs.
In any case, I suspect both grandiose and hateful desires and illusions follow sensibly from the time-hidden tracks of childhood’s social grammar.
What might keep a really bad train boiling down the line?
Absence of resistance linked to concepts not articulated within or otherwise remote from thought suspended generally in the cognitive texture of the culture of interest: one cannot call a man crazy who appears (given the tools at hand) merely inspired and passionate even if he turns out a copy of Charles Manson. Indeed, there’s a certain malignancy that knows its targets cannot defend themselves from what they cannot — or for love, will not — perceive in the reality that has approached them to engulf, use, and eventually destroy them.
The urgent post-9/11 intelligence directive became: “Do more, do better, do it differently, and do it now.” In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing—a scant two months before Snowden’s first leaks—the FBI was accused of not doing enough to track suspected terrorist sympathizers (even though those suspicions had come from the Russian intelligence service formerly known as the KGB). Two events, two contradictory reactions by the American public: one demanding that the government take action to identify and defeat terrorist threats, the other wary and untrusting of that same government.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Those who promote fear and do so with deceit also on occasion promote the “black swan” theory, the idea that nature produces an improbable event — like life on earth, for example, or two schnooks setting off compression cooker bombs cruelly designed to cut the legs from beneath marathon runners.
The grim review of improvised explosive devices deployed to encourage the adoption of “Islamic values” — or to discourage and subjugate others in the name of Islam — suggests such events are less “black swans”, or “bolts out of the blue” — another trite analog that works — than whole flocks of malevolent black crows.
In online chatyping, the subject of secrecy in Jihad / anti-Jihad activities and other spheres has come up, and I’ve playfully suggested the obvious: change computers and location, persona and voice.
Revert thoughts and data to paper — then burn the paper and rely on memory.
Some professions, say the performing arts, place premiums on memorization as the fundamental part of the craft.
Notably, in English literary arts, a part of the graduate examinations involve questions about who you know and what you know about them, but “who” and “them” may number among the thousands of characters of historic fictions.
In Arabic literature, I am guessing, the “who” and “them” may be the souls legend from earlier generations.
Indeed, my favorite correspondent on many subtopics Islamic suggests that operational code will only drill more deeply into remote corners of Islamic scripture, commentary, and law. The scholars of interest (believing themselves ” . . . more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”) would seem suspected of having their own communications, command, and control language subculture, and that in Arabic, within the depths of Arabic, and tucked away and harbored like precious and useful intellectual metal.
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Beginning with George Washington’s first State of the Union Address, in which he requested a secret fund for clandestine activities, intelligence has been an instrument to achieve the broad goals of the American people and the policies advanced by their duly elected representatives.
Put on a mask and other elements of costume; alter the walk and the talk; step out of primary character and into some other creature; and work it for a while.
Truth is hard.
One has to live with it and in the company of others who challenge and entertain about the same observations and perceptions. If, whatever it may be, proves relentlessly reliable and obstreperously valid — true! and whether we like it or not — it acquires a stability all its own and needs no help by way of arms, punishments, and threats.
The truth is not belief but a stubborn “is” and unmindful and uncaring of whatever human investment may be in it or not.
In the quotation section to the left of where you’re reading, you will find this from Maimonides:
“Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it.”
And I thought I was being original.
Be that as it may, the deceitful, I believe, persist in bending truth to will, the better to beatify and glorify themselves, to make themselves legend, eternally regarded — and that if not in greater social realities than their own heads and small and deeply isolated circles.
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In recent months also, I have read of lineage traced back to King David, an argument for the divine allocation of the right to rule over others.
No cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
As a Jew, I have been gently but firmly reminded of God’s demands for animal sacrifice and the restoration of Judaism to literal Levitican standards.
Again, no cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.
If such beliefs, levers, and sentiments have been suspended by mind in the language cherished by some minds, in just how many heads do the same arrangements persist?
What was read?
What was heard?
What was consequently formulated (about royal bloodlines, say, or irrational obligations and rituals)?
While I believe the human capacity for language invention and the invention of language-congruent cultural behavior bounded only by the necessities of place and responses to them plus desire and its many facets, I believe also that symbolic arrangements in language may be mapped, comprehended, and remapped. When that remapping has taken place in the natural development of a culture, and, say, “twerking” makes its way from youth novelty to something boring old grandmother used to do, we note the remarkable ability and flexibility English has for adaptive evolution; when force comes to erase or overlay a culture and its language, we think of that as cultural warfare and the prize is what is prised from the possession of the minds targeted.
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In Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire, the annual budget cited for secret U.S. intelligence operations in their totality was $52 billion.
I hope there is some money in that green ocean for poets.
My hypothesis and theory is that a) there is such a thing as the development of “social grammar” accompanying language uptake, b) that it is part of the learning of a language and subsequent navigation of a related language culture, and c) it has gravitational sway on formulations associated with perception and expression.
Basically: “Social Grammar” may be comprised of a set of rules a) governing relationships between symbols, beliefs about them, and related emotions, and b) serving to navigate cultural and social context in both perception (what is important to see) and expression (e.g., what is good to say; what is not; when; how; etc.).
What’s interesting in this proposed “detection” behavior is its placement in the uptake phase of natural language development, i.e., the idea that an infant picks up (“takes statistics”) on verbal inflection in such a way as to have pre-formed attitude and belief formula in advance of the acquisition of more sophisticated meaning. If even from the womb (from the instant the ears become active) we hear, for example, “Xanglies” pronounced bitterly, harshly, we may as we compile more information about “Xangley” have a bad feeling about Xangliness, whatever and whoever Xangley turns out to be.
This proposed base level behaviorism and building-block linguistic programming may have profound influence as the individual language-bound spirit becomes expressive, independent (seemingly), and mature. The rule carried forward from the formulation “Xanglies bad” (“X” <–> negative valence) may have control of later perception, and, because it was set into the basic behavioral programming of a developing consciousness prior to its own expressive capability and later reasoning ability, it may be nearly impossible to reach and repair at later stages. If true, it follows that a malevolent basic instruction formulated in infancy may serve as call to conflict and violence in later years.
In fact, we may flatter ourselves if we think that it’s more the oral and written literary traditions of cultures passed on to older minds that form our cause for the most absurd kinds of conflicts.
In this dismal view in which conflict devolves in part to social rules deduced by infants to facilitate their own survival-driven social communicating (i.e., social grammar), the fix may be in before the child shapes his first sentence.
What holds us together, improbably, may be probability in relation to language behavior that involves essentially repeated sounds that develop shared symbolic meaning and exhibit more or less stability across the life of a language culture.
For me, all avenues in linguistics lead back to metonymy and the update, development, weighting, and evolution of clusters of behavior involving words, functional grammar, and, most important for our interests here, social grammar. We’re not stuck with either the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty, i.e., the development of meaning may have predictable and stable qualities, but there seems much that is accidental and arbitrary in the development of culture and, by way of language, shared cultural perception.
Near unquestioned familiarity with a primary language affords a depth in humor and intuition generally unavailable in a second language. As instruments playing with words, we may be incredibly fine tuned, but that tuning depends on the continuation of conventions, habits, and practices — the more deeply held the assemblies, the less energy required to revisit and re-validate their adventageous qualities — any part of which may be subject to cultural and linguistic evolution.
I’ve never had much respect for the deconstructionists, their drift demonstrated so much more actively by poets who, depending on their mien, for better or worse, rearrange symbolic language relationships in the heads of those reading or hearing their inventions.
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