Orthodoxy and the meaning of events

Orthodoxy and the meaning of events is the title of an article recently published by Richard K. Moore, author of Escaping the Matrix: how We the People can change the world, and numerous insightful articles that are helpful in making sense of the present state of our world.

Here are some excerpts:

When something dramatic happens, we want to know what it means. We want answers to questions like: Why is it happening? How important is it? What will happen next? Where is it heading? What does it all mean?

In the mainstream narrative, the orthodox narrative, a clear meaning is always provided, right along with the news of the dramatic event itself. Like on the morning of 9/11, when the video of the explosions was first being shown, there was already a banner going across the screen: America under attack by Al Qaeda. And soon after: They want to destroy our democracy. 

This prompt assignment of meaning to an event has an important psychological effect. The first plausible explanation someone hears tends to fix in the subconscious, and resists being displaced by later explanations. That’s why the orthodox meaning is provided promptly, is repeated endlessly, and is reinforced from a variety angles by the various media genre, such as news broadcasts, talk shows, official announcements, comedians, documentaries, interviews, newspapers, etc.

It is easy to see why followers of the mainstream media would consider themselves to be well informed citizens. On any big public topic, they know what it means, and from that framework they can discuss this or that development from a knowing perspective, with a sense of knowing what they’re talking about. 

The world of the mainstream narrative is to a large extent a closed universe. Its stories and their meanings cover the whole scope of ‘what’s important’ and there’s no room for alternative explanations to find a place there. If a contrary explanation emerges from some non-mainstream source, there are many reasons why the explanation will be dismissed. First: ‘We already have an explanation for that’. Perhaps next: ‘Who are you that thinks you know better than the world’s experts?’ Every source that is non-mainstream is automatically suspect.

Moore goes on the say that:

In the orthodox world big changes always come as a response to some unexpected crisis (eg Pearl Harbor, 9/11, WMDs, 2008 collapse, COVID). A crisis is identified, it is given a meaning, and changes are announced. And then another crisis comes along, and again we get big changes. Each crisis comes with its own little meaning story, unrelated to the meaning of the crisis that came before or the one that comes after. Society stumbles along, it seems, always responding to unexpected crises. 

If someone observes that there is a pattern in such sequence, they are dismissed as paranoid or a “conspiracy theorist,” and that “conversations of any significant kind are nearly impossible across the boundary of the orthodox bubble.”

So much of each person’s worldview is based on the trust they have in the sources of the information they regularly consume, whether is MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, New York Times, the Washington Post or other long established sources with big reputations. But it has been well documented how the media channels throughout the world have been gradually absorbed into a few mega-corporations, and how the owners of those channels use them in the process of Manufacturing Consent to the demands of the elite class that they represent, and their power has become greatly enlarged in the years since Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, described it in their book by that name. That, and other aspects of the decline of western civilization since the 1970’s is also well documented in a video I watched recently titled, HEIST Who Stole the American Dream.

Richard Moore’s article concludes with his views on how people with differing beliefs about reality might talk with one another in a productive way. I strongly recommend that readers take the time to digest the entire article which can be found on Moore’s website.

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