1 Reality check Guidelines for the use of Internet sources and brain cells about five big questions of our time which emerge one out of the other: ① How to solve the conflict between the quest for truth, care for other beings, and spiritual growth on the one side and survival interests like job, health, money, family, and pleasure on the other side? ② Is there clearly a good side worth fighting for, and an evil side to be pushed back? ③ How can we perceive reality? (Once we anyhow have to think global) ④ Who runs the world? Are there identifiable structures, groups, persons? If there are such entities, what are their plans? ⑤ Can humanity avoid near-term extinction? Are the global problems and major threats collateral or intended damage? This reality check will be done step by step by using categories like “left/right”, “above/below”, “the big picture/details”, significant/insignificant”, “truth/lie”. It is also a reader for the class “International Manners and Protocol II. Subtitle: Capitalism and Human Nature. Second subtitle: In seven-league boots to media competence and scientific thinking”. Whereas the class “IMP I” provides you a rather relativistic view on the cultures in times of globalization, about their customs and behaviors which leads to the insight that we all behave differently and yet are all humans, praise diversity, the “Atlas of Beauty”,1 IMP II dares a rather “absolutistic” view on our globalized culture beyond the surface. What are the real protocols in our minds? How have they been changing? In analogy to the project mentioned above this could be called “Atlas of Truth”. Jochen Stappenbeck, [email protected], update June 2017 Contents I. Correction of perception. Big is big, and small is small………..2 II. Purity and impurity of sources……………………….…..……..6 III. What if the powerful prefer to hide?...........................................10 IV. Capitalism and conspiracy………………………….…………..15 V. Is examining the power structures “left” or “right”?...................17 VI. The internal diversity of the so called alternative media………26 VII. One conspiracy at a time, one reality box at a time…….…...….32 1 https://www.facebook.com/MihaelaNorocPhoto/ 2 I. Correction of perception. Big is big, and small is small. What do you see here? Which reality in this picture do you prefer? Who is closer to the “real”? We, the observers outside the box, or the man inside the box? What is wrong or right with these maps? 3 4 Same inter-national world – different perception. 1) Gall-Peters map with correct area proportions. South up, North down. 2) Same with North up. Up = positive, down = negative 3) Distribution of wealth in the world in 2015 4) Mercator projection of the world. Eurocentrism. Equal size of moon and sun. A miracle? Or trivial? Every child knows that one of them is much bigger and farer than the other. But why is it that for our eyes they have the exact same size?2 Is this significant or not? Shall we be surprised or not? Our common sense says: no. How can we correct distortions of our world view, of our thinking? We want to see reality in objective proportions. 2 Every 18 years there is an exception. The ring-form eclipse of the sun. Most recent: First September 2016. Most famous example: 1818/5/5 = birth of Karl Marx. 5 By questioning: what or who created this worldview for us? By which interests was he driven? The limitations and traps in our perception can be easily abused. By re-translating nouns into verbs, states into deeds. This is a table = someone cut a tree, someone put together wood, someone sold it, someone bought it, someone put it into the room. By re-contextualizing what we seem to know. By making visible invisible structures. This is the step from IMP I where we explore the relationships between nations and cultures by thinking in relativistic terms, by exploring the perception of one’s own culture and the other’s culture, to IMP II where we question the concept of a world made of nations and cultures. Is “international” the same as “global” or “globalized”? No. Individual – local – regional – national – international – global – universal. What comes before individual and after universal? Perhaps one and the same. In India there is the concept of Atman = Brahman. The soul/essence of a single being is identical with the essence of the whole. Our task is more modest: to explore our perception of the world in the context of globalization.3 Our method is similar to Sherlock Holmes’ method: simple questions about who did what? Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson decide to go on a camping trip. After dinner and a bottle of wine, they lay down for the night, and go to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend. "Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see." Watson replied, "I see millions of stars." "What does that tell you?" Watson pondered for a minute. "Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets." "Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo." "Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three." "Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant." "Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow." "What does it tell you, Holmes?" 3 In 1983 this term was made popular. By the way, in the same year the term “virtual reality” was coined. 6 Holmes was silent for a minute, then spoke: "Watson, you idiot. Someone has stolen our tent!" Good exercise: 1. Video East meets West 2. Charlie Chaplin “The great Dictator”. II. Purity and impurity of sources Media competence means how to work with the sources, how to be aware of them. Even if we deal with big questions, it is first of all about the sources – that what lies between the questions and the questioner. Sources are not raw material. Information and inspiration are raw material. Sources are complex things. They are highly sensitive to social influence and emotional judgment. Like in nature, we desire pure sources. Unlike in nature, the purity is not so easily measurable. If the environment is clean, then we assume that the water is clean, too. If the environment of a source seems to us politically and morally clean, then we can accept it, drink from its informational water. And vice versa. This is reasonable and helps us to spare time and energy. But this is in the same time a possibility of being manipulated what I call “the purity of the sources trap”. In the following I show how this possibility of manipulation is being applied to an extent which is hardly imaginable: in the media, in the educational and political systems. In order to break out of the manipulation, in the age of information and disinformation we need to add another habit of gathering information: a selective approach to any source, regardless of its link to a positive or negative connotation. We are free from fear that we could be associated with incorrect people or groups. Anyhow, the sources of the like-minded tend not to help to expand the view, as they confirm our own views and convictions. This selective approach requires awareness and special methods which are provided in this paper. A great help are the audio sources. When you listen to someone without being distracted by other impulses, ideally walking around in nature, you tend to get much deeper into the meaning of his words. A good source leads you to other sources with more primary information which serves as evidence for arguments and theses. Like with food, we should be very skeptical towards processed food4, processed sources which cause hidden side-effects in favor of their producers only, and look for simple, healthy, natural, unprocessed food: documents, articles, books, own experience and experiments, carried out by people whom you can identify clearly via audio and video. 4 A new disease was invented to stop us wanting healthy food: orthorexia nervosa. 7 Read and write: Paste the source into a file and develop it, read the source while highlighting and commenting it, not forgetting to separate between your own thoughts and the author’s contribution. New insights into the scientific method (of extended or holistic science, simple thinking) which is closely linked to that approach to sources can be accepted and acquired easier after this short practical introduction. Difficulties should not occur so much with the understanding, rather with the acceptance of that understanding.5 There are methods how to extract good information out of any source regardless of its origins and the labels put on it. In class we do it this way: 5 In my theory there are two types of thinking: the contextual thinking and the decontextual thinking. The first makes use of intuition and all possible facts out of the context, sometimes without the necessary verification. The latter wants to avoid unsafe conclusions. Example: Rumsfeld declared on September, 10, 2001 the loss of 2 trillion dollars. A few hours later something from the sky helped vaporize the correspondent documents in the Pentagon. Contextual thinking: evident link. “True enough” (ascribed to Wittgenstein). Decontextual thinking: no proof. “Not true enough”. 8 The 3 steps method to work with every single source We take a word file, copy the source into it or at least the link, highlight key passages and then write: 1) Formal aspect a. Who is the author, what is the title, the medium, when, where b. How is it made? Note some specifics, unexpected, weird elements, contradictions just by looking at the source (and store them for 3)) 2) Main message a.