Prevalence Of Deceit And Propaganda

The information condition the Story begins in — where those who teach are themselves obliged to repeat what is not true, so that even the educated are divided by what they were taught.

The observation is narrower and harder than there is a lot of misinformation. It is that in many parts of the world the people whose office is to tell the truth — teachers, religious leaders, political leaders — are beholden to those in power and repeat what power requires, so that formal education is not a reliable escape. Two well-taught people can come out holding accounts that cannot both be true, each certain of theirs, each trained by an institution. The result is not ignorance but confident, structured disagreement, and the fruit of it is division and distrust (Distortion · Control Of Information · Fraud In The Inception).

That is why this belongs to the diagnosis rather than to a grievance. If the common instruments for establishing what is true have themselves been bent, then a people cannot reason its way out together, because it cannot agree on the ground to reason from. Every downstream problem — coordinating, deciding, trusting anyone at scale — becomes unsolvable while it holds (Sensemaking · Truth · The Meta Crisis · Communication Debt).

The response the canon takes is not a counter-broadcast, which would be the same move with a different content. It is the slower one: Navigating Towards Truth together, with humility, holding conclusions as Current Best Understanding and saying openly that We Do Not Know; checking sources and keeping Provenance on what is carried (Second reader · Truth To ØNE, Errors To Us); preferring what can be seen and tested locally over what is reported from far away (Testimony · Prototype · The grandmother test); and building the habits of discernment in people rather than filters around them (Discernment · Types Of Knowing · Recognizing Psychic Attack).

The condition also asks for restraint in describing it. A page about deceit that overstates its own case has joined the thing it names — so what is claimed here is what the canon claims: that the teaching institutions are widely compromised, and that this is enough to explain the division, without any further assertion about who arranged it (Wise Right Speech · We Do Not Know).

Also called: the information condition Stands on: Truth · Kontrolle · Society Opens onto: Control Of Information · Distortion · Navigating Towards Truth · Sensemaking · Discernment · Overton Window · Visible Power Structures · The Caves · Wake up In play: the Story — the condition a reader is in before they begin, and the reason the first move is to look rather than to be told Sources: Prevalence Of Deceit And Propaganda (root page, draft — the observation about educators and leaders beholden to power, and the division that follows) · The Book of LIØNSBERG, Chapter 1 (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Prevalence Of Deceit And Propaganda Open: The root page states the condition as something determined by a receiver in the Story's own narrative voice; whether it is offered as a claim about the world or as a plot observation is not marked, and the two read very differently. · Inbound links were not counted for this page.