The Dark Heart of Politics: Barriers To People?

You can watch the full advert here: Robocop - Yamaha Heart Advert Commercial from Paul Verhoeven's Robocop. It's a brilliant piece of satire which Verhoeven observed directly as a Dutchman occuring in the United States which matches a useful quote by Isaac Asimov fr. "Why Society Needs Science-Fiction":-

"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be...Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."

For the past number of blogs, the target or subject has been "Vote Leave". They have been a particular focus or face of the problems of our politics but not the full picture. You the viewer are the final piece in this picture of politics and the need to see politics and it's problems. Before suggesting this, much like science-fiction we need to look at "society" with new eyes. Some of the examples can be found easily on YouTube:-

It's amazing how these actors enact such unreal scenarios as if that is the most perfectly natural thing in the world to do!

These "live" commercial dial-up infomercial" mistakes are pure gold for combining the complete phony sensory information from what you understand the situation to actually be.

And so this all leads on to how we actually do politics in our present time, our present politicians, our present media and finally - YOU! ("The Viewer") - our present people:-

 

EU InOrOut: David Cameron, full 'debate' (02Jun16) ~ Brought to you by Sky News on Sky News TV news and also Sky News Mobile as well as Sky News Internet and did we mention, Sky News...

In the previous blog the contention was made concerning the difficulty of people to perceive politics. A large part of this problem is that in fact, unquestionably politics is produced in a form that "works" at exciting people emotionally in some manner or other: Namely emotionally unbalancing them through the senses: The more effective at this the more proven the data that people will be persuaded or at least influenced how to vote through their emotions more than their own assessment of their level of understanding.

In the above "interview" all I'm seeing is a bunch of actors selling some obscenely weird context to me... their manner reminds me of the over-excited commercial actor, desperately talking too quickly to fit in their spiel in the seconds of advertising available to grab peoples' attention and effect a sale to a mass of passive viewers.

This is the context that I would introduce to:-

EU Referendum: breaking the bubble

"And Remember... We Care!"

"By so doing, Roland managed to demonstrate that, once shorn of its identity, there is a real demand for the ideas expressed in Flexcit."

We see that FLEXCIT, a highly researched treatment of Brexit, is exposed to these same forces of societal selection on appearance and advertising that dominates so much of how we attempt to communicate our political decision-making. This is a very real result. The supposed "intelligensia" from Isaac Asimov again:-

"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

"And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all."

And to come back to FLEXCIT and "Breaking The Bubble" above:-

"For all that, we are under no illusions. Leaving the EU is not only a revolution in our relations with the Continent. It is also a fundamental restructuring of domestic governance, involving a long-overdue reshaping of the post-war settlement. Not by any means do we underestimate the gravity of what we propose.

That is why we need to win the intellectual argument - and why we need a plan. Flexcit demonstrates that this can do this without undue pain and without unacceptable risk. At the end of the process we have a United Kingdom fit to do business with the world as it is rather than how it was when Mr Monnet dreamed up the European Union.

Yet, only weeks now from the referendum, we're still discussing the basics. Roland Smith is still having to hide the true source of his papers for fear of offending the "nose bleeders". And Mr Cameron is thus able to get away with criticising the "leave" campaign for not having a plan, when we've had one all along." 

If you do read the above blog post, it's particular focused summary of so much work to attempt to communicate without the excesses of advertising in the way I've attempted to describe and compare above. For these reasons:-

1. It's more honest
2. It's more challenging to pay attention to and consider if you are used to the "advertising" of communication, it may even feel "alien" and unpleasantly "dense".
3. It will likely be far far less successful at communicating to numbers of people.
4. There is no short-cut to learning for oneself to be able to "blank out" the deceptions on our "doors of perception" perpetrated in favour of understanding the actual behaviour of people in connection with the quality of knowledge being conveyed Eg "Infocommercials".
5. As much as for example FLEXCIT can be offered to people, a very high quality form of knowledge on the EU, Referendum and Brexit subjects, the barriers to understanding, in this blog's case, "advertising as low quality communication" and hence high ignorance of politics will continue to result.
6. Vote Leave or Remain, the above (5.) holds and will take precedence before political progress is possible.
7. At the heart of FLEXCIT: Self-Governance, but this is exactly what the likes of David Cameron and the Westminster Political Class do understand very well about people: If they are able to communicate to people in a form that works, then people probably DO NEED such people to govern for them!

Understanding The Mountains of Madness

UK Politics: At the Mountains of Madness

In H.P. Lovecraft's story, At the Mountains of Madness, an expedition to Antarctica in 1930, discovers the remnant's of an alien civilization's history on Earth, both biological, cosmic, geological on a vast unimaginable scale. The book deals in themes of horror of the unknown, of the incomprehensible scale (for example Deep Time in science) and how all these things conspire to produce madness in people not able or equipped to cope with such "traumas to their accepted reality"; as these mountains rise, larger even than Everest in the Himalayas, symbolizes: The walls to what people can comprehend, beyond which our minds would be shattered if we dared to venture, encountering the unfathomable monsters that lurk there.

"the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time". ~ Deep Time: John Playfair, June 1788 on the age of rock strata.

Similar themes shape on a more personal and psychological level, the writing of Philip K. Dick where the veil of reality is lifted and glimpses beyond trigger a chain-reaction of implications for the present reality or else the veil is entirely ripped to shreds irrevocably. In these stories the "veil" either took the form of "altered states of consciousness" or the "machinations of authoritarian governments" on the people.

Previously we looked at in Pattern Recognition "The Bruges Group (see side bar) provides a mountain of quotes supporting The Great Deception is genuinely another pattern..." and before that the "political orthodoxy of our EU Membership from the mouths of our Prime Ministers in their own words.

Scale & Calculation: The virtual reality "code" generated in The Matrix

A similar theme of a "mind-blowing revelation" in it's sheer scale of deception is found in the "cyberpunk sci-fi" movie-story: The Matrix. And here the challenges of "a prison for the mind" are considered, not unlike in a real comparative sense the sheer scale of orthodoxy or dogma on thousands to millions of people. Or perhaps as relevant to our "Representative Democracy" the huge scale of apathy and low-turn out and participation by people who have "better things to do":-

Large crowd of Christmas shoppers enjoying London's Oxford Street festive decorations

And so the extraordinarily interesting question arises: If people have been plied with propaganda to accept a particular political norm for decades: How do you reverse some of that process? Political parties in our "Representative Democracy" are not in the business of training and developing good arguments in their supporters, they're in the business of recruitment for millions of people, as per the General Elections results in the UK for 2015:-

  Scale of Recruitment in British Politics per Party: 2015 General Elections

YouGov Poll break-down of Pro-EU vs Anti-EU Support

 Dr. RAE North chronicles, EU politics: Barroso's swan song :-

However, at nearly 9,000 words, this is a seriously long speech, almost of the style we'd expect from a Soviet leader, rather than a soon to be ex-Commission president, a man who tells us he has been "actively involved in the process of European integration over the last 30 years". [...]

Barroso then turns to the relationship between the EU and the UK. He "passionately believes" that Europe is stronger with the UK as its member, and that the UK "is stronger as a member of the EU than on its own". But he acknowledges that for historical, geopolitical and economic reasons, "the case of the UK may be seen as a special one".

Precisely because of this, Barroso thinks it would be a mistake to transform an exception for the UK into a rule for everybody else. We can, and should, he says, "Specificity", inasmuch as this does not threaten the Union's overall coherence. But we should not confound this specificity with an overall situation of the Union.

If you remember this was (Summer 2014) and now is after The Greek "Specificity or Crisis". Our own politicians are of a like-mind. They too are wondering how to deal with the UK's "specificity" in the EU. And we come back to our question above, looking at the sheer scale of numbers of voters involved and the "inertia" of thinking that hence arises due to the Status Quo Effect.

In Politicians: No Taste, No Style, So Derivative! we modelled the Political Spectrum as per YouGov's Analysis: EU referendum – the state of public opinion as a Political Prism:-

Red + Violet = GREEN

We've come all the signs that indicate RED = Pro-EU (see Pattern Recognition) support and VIOLET = ANTI-EU (See UKIP + Leave.EU via Fatal Car Crash: Two Dead After Car Accident) support framing the debate in The Westminster Political-Media Bubble and hence reflected across the Legacy News-Media page after page of "Mountains Of Madness":-

• Do David Cameron's EU negotiations really matter at all?
•  If this is perfidy, it works for Britain For Janen Ganesh
•  Yes, the EU is flawed. That's exactly why we can’t just all walk away
•  EU In And Out Campaigns Have Blazing Row On LBC

Frog Fractions: The Boiling Frog: EU Referendum: 51%

"Assuming therefore, for the sake of argument, a turnout of between 65-70%, this would leaves us with between 29.3 million and 31.5 million potential voters. To achieve the magic 51% we would need to convince around 16 million voters."

And now the same process is shaping the upcoming Referendum, from Dominic Cummings' blog:

Roughly one third of the British public is very hostile to the EU, one third is pro-EU, a fifth wants to leave but is worried about jobs and living standards, and a fifth doesn’t know (perhaps doesn’t care). In the 1970s, the EEC was seen as a modernising project and connected to Britain’s recovery from basket case status. Echoes of this were still there during the euro battle 1999-2002. This feeling seems to have died. Focus groups strongly support the data above and suggest that the financial crisis, the Greek euro crisis, and the migrant crisis all played an important part in changing sentiment.

If one looks at this crucial ‘swing’ fifth, they now break 59:41 for ‘remain’. This suggests that if the ‘leave’ campaign persuades these people that a ‘leave’ vote will be followed by a free trade deal and friendly cooperation, then the ‘leave’ campaign will win. The ‘remain’ campaign has many advantages, such as its grip on conventional wisdom in institutions such as the BBC and CBI (which were deeply wrong on the euro). Its fundamental position, however, clearly has significant weaknesses.

Dr. RAE North notes EU Referendum: a particularly stupid idea that this GREEN = Rebranded Dogma to coral millions along the latest twist in our Argumentum Ad Infinitum aka The Great Deception. As you'd expect this approach is hugely popular with the Westminster Political-Media Bubble as Dr. RAE North once again observes: EU Referendum: when "no" means "yes"

• Matthew Parris in the Spectator
• Simon Jenkins in the Guardian
• James Kirkup in The Daily Telegraph

In the above, there is no definition of The Great Deception (The Cage: Safe but trapped or Free but in danger?); it's replaced by The Mountains Of Madness, how The Referendum (The Cage Door) will be conducted via 2 superficial opposite reflections (Red vs Violet) and no definition of The Positive Vision outside the EU (Beyond The Cage). For this we'd need people to understand that "white light", not this "green light" of deception and self-deception that will be the properties of Campaigns Of Great Concern but little real value. Herding into "The Middle" merely produces the madness in the above picture.