> "What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted"
I was just thinking about this today when reading about "Petrodollars", Gaddafi, and all the wars and hostilities started with countries that try to sell oil for anything but US dollars. There is a lot of complexities to geo-politics that are far outside the confines of the simple versions that are transmitted over and over again in news and popular culture. When we come across these big complex issues, it's hard to synthesis this new information into understanding, or an extended worldview, because there is nowhere to stick it in the first place. It takes a lot of mental energy to build the scaffold to hold new information. I think the aversion to expending mental energy is one thing that leads to just ignoring these things, or seeking the easy path of conspiracism.
It is the graphic and emotionally compelling part of these stories that my mind tends to be able to hang onto. In the case of Libya, video of the young Tuareg men in now ungoverned southern regions driving their beat up car from one town to the next and being shot at by snipers. Think about the HK or BLM demonstrations. It is often these tactical scenes that are transmitted to us, more than the cultural or political side. I guess the manipulation of these emotional images is just propaganda and is as old as conflict. ("the other side are baby eaters")
Maturation as a critical thinker is a long hard process that can't be done alone. I worry that it is not something that we as societies are generally not well set up to do.
With the shift to a tribal, partisan world, where there are more informations comes from privately employed Public relationships specialist, than Journalist working in the public interest, what will be the state of scaffolds in many peoples minds, and will they be able to support being told anything new..