[Reader-list] Fwd: inception

[Inder Salim]

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Published on Friday, July 30, 2010 by TruthDig.com
The Deception of Real-Life 'Inception'

By David Sirota

For all of its "Matrix"-like convolutions and "Alice in Wonderland"
allusions, the new film "Inception" adds something significant to the
ancient ruminations about reality's authenticity-something profoundly
relevant to this epoch of confusion. In the movie's tale of corporate
espionage, we are asked to ponder this moment's most disturbing
epistemological questions: Namely, how are ideas deposited in people's minds
 and how incurable are those ideas when they are wrong?

Many old sci-if stories, like politics and advertising of the past,
subscribed to the "Clockwork Orange" theory that says blatantly
propagandistic repetition is the best way to pound concepts into the human
brain. But as "Inception's" main character, Cobb, posits, the "most
resilient parasite" of all is an idea that individuals are subtly led to
think they discovered on their own.

This argument's real-world application was previously outlined by Cal State
Fullerton's Nancy Snow, who wrote in 2004 that today's most pervasive and
effective propaganda is the kind that is "least noticeable" and consequently
"convinces people they are not being manipulated." The flip side is also
true: When an idea is obviously propaganda, it loses credibility. Indeed, in
the same way the subconscious of "Inception's" characters eviscerate known
invaders, we are reflexively hostile to ideas when we know they come from
agenda-wielding intruders.

These laws of cognition, of course, are brilliantly exploited by a 24/7
information culture that has succeeded in making "your mind the scene of the
crime," as "Inception's" trailer warns. Because we are now so completely
immersed in various multimedia dreamscapes, many of the prefabricated-and
often inaccurate-ideas in those phantasmagorias can seem wholly
self-realized and, hence, totally logical.

The conservative media dreamland, for instance, ensconces its audience in an
impregnable bubble-you eat breakfast with the Wall Street Journal's
editorial page, you drive to the office with right-wing radio, you flit
between Breitbart and Drudge at work, you come home to Fox News. The ideas
bouncing around in this world-say, ideas about the Obama administration
allegedly favoring blacks-don't seem like propaganda to those inside the
bubble. With heavily edited videos of screaming pastors and
prejudice-sounding Department of Agriculture officials, these ideas are
cloaked in the veneer of unchallenged fact, leaving the audience to assume
its bigoted conclusions are completely self-directed and incontrovertible.

Same thing for those living in the closed-loop of the "traditional" media.
Replace conservative news outlets with The New York Times, National Public
Radio, WashingtonPost.com and network newscasts, and it's just another
dreamscape promulgating certain synthetic ideas (for instance, militarism
and market fundamentalism), excluding other ideas (say, antiwar opinions and
critiques of the free market) and bringing audiences to seemingly
self-conceived and rational judgments-judgments that are tragically
misguided.

Taken together, our society has achieved the goal of "Inception's"
idea-implanting protagonists-only without all the technological subterfuge.
And just as they arose with Cobb's wife, problems are emerging in our
democracy as the dreams sow demonstrable fallacies.

As writer Joe Keohane noted in a recent Boston Globe report about new
scientific findings, contravening facts no longer "have the power to change
our minds" when we are wrong.

"When misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to
corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds," he wrote.
"In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs."

What is the circuit breaker in this delusive cycle? It's hard to know if one
exists, just as it is difficult to know whether Cobb's totem ever stops
spinning. For so many, meticulously constructed fantasies seem like
indisputable reality. And because those fantasies' artificial inception is
now so deftly obscured, we can no longer wake up, even if facts tell us we
re in a dream-and even when the dream becomes a nightmare.


© 2010 Creators.com

David Sirota is a bestselling author whose newest book is "The Uprising." He
is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the
Progressive States Network-both nonpartisan organizations. Sirota was once
US Senator Bernie Sanders' spokesperson. His blog is at www.credoaction
com/sirota.



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