Although the author belabours the point a little, this is a decent summary of how self-hypnosis can, and does, operate.
… a coordinated mass culture, propagated by mass media, creates realities in people’s minds and experiences according to the designs of those with control over the mass media mechanisms. [•••] The advent of “vaccine hesitancy” as a concept is an insidious device, one of many we are currently bombarded with to separate us as people into groups—to focus our attention on what we’re supposed to consider important, to divide us against each other, and to undermine our sovereignty. It subtly gaslights us with implied nudges from an external authority instructing us about what we ought to do.
Excellent. Needed spelling out! The power of language and the current manipulation of our language choices is often overlooked. As is the extraordinary redefinition of words that’s been going on.
I’ve also long been exercised by the creeping incursion of the relative pronoun ‘that’ instead of ‘who’ into contexts in which its use wouldn’t previously have been appropriate, something I knee-jerkingly attribute to US corporate-speak. I know there is interchangeability in certain usages but the overall effect is to (unwittingly?) reduce humans to the status of objects (who would want that??), to which I object.
It’s age, Alan. Live long enough, and you see the usages change; in our time, unfortunately, away from Literate Brit English towards Illiterate USAmerican Pop-English. An unfortunate phenomena - if you see what I mean…
I’m one of the oldies that finds this hard to stomach - if you see what I mean…
Further thoughts: she’s spot-on with the ‘privilege’ analysis though when I see that word what springs to my mind is ‘hereditary p’ & ‘the royal family’ etc - a US citizen is obviously more likely to find the resonance with ‘race theory’. Daughter (aged 41), when invited, also automatically went to the royal family to find her paradigm of privilege even though her knowledge of her partner (mixed race, brought up in South Africa & London, ex-SWP ideologue, covid bedwetter)'s keen awareness of white privilege as a thing made it hard for her to appreciate RK’s argument!
Not so well-aimed as far as conspiracy theory is concerned: she has accepted the magical redefinition of ‘theory’ (= crackpot idea) that enables the ‘conspiracy theory’ spell. A theory is the outcome of a thorough investigation into the truth/falsehood, strength/weakness of a hypothesis and, as such, has status in the world of science far above that of an unconsidered speculation. The consequent demeaning of the word ‘theory’ (thanks, CIA) has done a great deal of damage to the quality of public debate. Nothing happens by accident in politics eh?
