The How and Why of Political Spin
"Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand went much further, developing both a formal definition of art and an entire theory of aesthetics:
“Art,” she said, “is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need [for illustrative reality] by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental views of himself and his existence. It tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important.”
“Art,” she said, “is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need [for illustrative reality] by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental views of himself and his existence. It tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important.”
Part of the conspiratorial and Bush/Obama-is-the-devil thinking comes from our desire to associate important events with important causes. It's uncomfortable to think how random events could have huge consequences for us.
I also think, on print and video media, it's easier to get a lot of hits by writing about a pitched battle of good vs evil in which the fate of humankind is at stake than about how the world really is.
That's why liberals and their mentality is such a joke. They don't want to make rules or set out clearly defined and unchanging standards, because those get in the way of them doing what they want at any given point in time. What they don't want to recognize is that consequences can only be dictated by choosing the action that precedes them. That is natural law, and they seek to override this for their own petty schemes.
No, I think the real trick is defining those paragon virtues and morals in the first place. Once you have them, you are set. And if one is willing to analyze consequences and from them derive the preceding actions, they can be arrived at both easily and logically.
“It [the brain] is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.”
You can observe an example of this when playing cards; poker for example. What you observe as a "run" of good or bad cards doesn't really exist since the results of the next hand has nothing to do with the previous hand (given a deck of randomly shuffled cards.)
“Conspiratorial thinking,” infers Gottschall, “is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.”
When I see words like "reflex" in this context, I get nervous. The implication is that this is something over which you have no control and I find that problematic, hence my comment.
spin - how it seeps through.....Right on!!