Tuesday, October 22, 2019
As Important as Preference Falsification - The Overton Window
oftwominds | If you're truly interested in finding solutions to humanity's pressing problems, then start helping us pry open the Overton Window.
The Overton Window describes the spectrum of concepts, policies and approaches that can be publicly discussed without being ridiculed or marginalized as "too radical," "unworkable," "crazy," etc. The narrower the Overton Window, the greater the impoverishment of public dialog and the fewer the solutions available.
Those holding power in a socio-economic-political system that's unraveling devote their remaining energy to closing the Overton Window so that only "approved" narratives and policies that support the status quo are "allowed" into the public sphere.
Everything outside this narrow band of status-quo-supportive narratives is immediately disparaged as "fake news," "Kremlin talking points," or other highly charged accusations designed to close the Overton Window--a process Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called manufacturing consent: if no "outside" ideas are allowed, people accept the status quo as "all there is and all there can possibly be."
This narrow Overton Window benefits those in power who are "legally looting" the system.
There is another source of a narrow Overton Window: the cultural, social and political elites have no new ideas and so they cling to doing more of what's failed, relying on the past successes of now-failing strategies to cement their power.
Michael Grant described how this failure of imagination and devotion to the past leads inevitably to decline and collapse in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:
By
CNu
at
October 22, 2019
0 Comments
Labels: hypnosis , narrative , propaganda , tricknology , wake-up! , What IT DO Shawty...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Hidden Holocausts At Hanslope Park
radiolab | This is the story of a few documents that tumbled out of the secret archives of the biggest empire the world has ever known, of...
-
theatlantic | The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers...
-
dailybeast | Of all the problems in America today, none is both as obvious and as overlooked as the colossal human catastrophe that is our...
-
Video - John Marco Allegro in an interview with Van Kooten & De Bie. TSMATC | Describing the growth of the mushroom ( boletos), P...