The art of induced hallucination
(How pickles have no place at the breakfast table)
Seth Godwynn
If you have access to the internet (which is a fair bet, what with you currently reading this, and there being no other way to do so, unless you have a lot of old metal fillings, or had a really nasty head injury involving a wire coat-hanger…), you have probably been deceived at least a dozen times since breakfast.
What might surprise you though is that said deceptions may not have actually contained a single word of falsehood. For example, regard this recent headline (or possibly Tweet):
“Because of COVID, hospitals are overwhelmed, with patients being treated in corridors”
It’s a very familiar story if you’ve spent this past year not being an ostrich, or spent your time chewing wire coat-hangers out of your skull with your own metal teeth. Your takeaway, no doubt, is the same old same old, COVID infection outbreak or sustained high infection rate, something like that. You know, a lot of COVID.
But that’s where you’d be wrong. The hospitals in question were in New Zealand, which at the time of writing had approximately zero COVID cases. So the headline had to be telling a bit of a fib, right?
Well, not so fast there. Whenever a headline makes a seemingly epic claim, it’s always a good idea to read it again to look out for anomalies, and try to determine if there’s anything important that it isn’t saying.
Here, the wording choice gives us some clues.
“Because of COVID, hospitals are overwhelmed…” is, if you stop to overthink it, a rather unnatural phrasing for such a mundane inference. If it was an article translated from Japanese, I would put it down to second language interference on the part of the translator—it really is the bane of our professional existences! But as there’s no good reason to suspect an article about New Zealand in a New Zealand daily would have been translated from a Japanese source on this particular occasion, I’m inclined to assume there’s some other reason why they didn’t go with a more natural phrasing: something along the lines of, “Hospitals overwhelmed by COVID patients…”
The most likely explanation for that, is that it’s not COVID patients they’re claiming the hospitals are overwhelmed with/by.
Once you can establish what isn’t being said, the rest kind of falls into place. Steps that were taken to prevent spread of COVID have meant that rooms intended for six can now only house three, every other seat in the waiting room has a sign taped to it telling you to get lost, and staff and doctors are forced to work at reduced capacity because, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. So patients coming in with regular ailments or injuries have nowhere to sit, and there aren’t enough beds for more serious cases.
All pretty obvious really, but it’s not the impression you’d get from reading the headline (or Tweet, or whatever). You’ve been deceived without a single lie being told.
In fact, it’s often so cleverly done that I’m willing to put it down to happenstance. Journalists have no compunction lying about anything and everything, any time they want, and there’s nothing you or I or anybody else can do about it. Why would they suddenly now feel the need to be deceptively honest?
There are however times when the technique is used purposely to lull people into thinking that something has been said that absolutely hasn’t. It’s surprisingly common in legalese—the language of the law. Legalese is very precise and difficult for laymen to read so, often, language is put in that appears to prohibit something, but actually doesn’t, and they would prefer for you to believe the former. For example:
“Illegal parking of bicycles is prohibited.”
Yes, but is it illegal to park HERE? (Sign shrugs)
“… is a violation of applicable laws.”
If a law exists prohibiting …, then … would be in violation of said law. But is there such a law? (Crickets)
“Do not make illegal copies of this disc.”
I’ll be sure to only make legal copies then. Incidentally, what precisely would constitute an illegal copy? (Distant church bells)
So how is it possible that we can so consistently hear things that haven’t been said, and see things that aren’t there, to a degree that this misunderstanding can be induced purposefully by an external actor?
Well to be perfectly honest with you, as a species, we really are a bit crap at this sort of thing. We’re not nearly half as clever as we think we are.
What we are good at though is convincing ourselves that we are bloody geniuses, and dedicate considerable head space to doing precisely that. Hilarity often results from this, as does divorce proceedings, social unrest, and wide scale atrocities etc. ‘Why do good people do bad things?’ is a topic I want to cover another time, but the long and short of it is that, if that is not the question you are asking, then history probably doesn’t have much to offer you.
So in the case of seeing things that aren’t there, what is happening is that you make a gut based interpretation of what’s been said, and your brain massages your ego by telling you how brilliant you are, and how you were right all along about everything. You’ve now convinced yourself of something that isn’t true, confirmed it with your own eyes and ears, and are permanently locked into that mindset. It’s personal; you will happily die on that hill.
As this is quite a jar of pickles we’ve opened, and as I happen to really like pickles, I say we explore this further!
Another time we try to convince ourselves of things about ourselves and the world around us that simply aren’t true, is when we get agitated, even slightly, over anything. When this happens, your emotions start calling the shots, and the rational part of your brain goes into overdrive trying to convince you that there is a solid logical reason for your agitation, and it’s an ATTACK, goddammit! You are a rational person after all, so you wouldn’t just react emotionally to something if there wasn’t a good reason, right? I mean, duh!!
Except that’s exactly what we do. All the time.
Propagandists and journalists (redundancy noted) capitalise on this tendency on a daily basis. The business model of the latter has nothing to do with some deeply held commitment to the truth (scoffs in classical prose). It instead relies on keeping their audience in a perpetual state of anxiety, because people can’t think or behave rationally in that state, but can be easily convinced or persuaded using purely emotional manipulation techniques. The goal of the persuasion might be to keep you coming back to their publication for the ad revenue, or to buy something, or to support a political ideology, or to convince you that genocide is a really good idea—you know the sort of thing; the sky really is the limit. Examples of all of these goals can be found every day in the modern mainstream press, right there in the open for everyone to see and then pretend aren’t there, or more realistically, to see and then convince themselves that these really are fantastic ideas.
The way it works is so simple that Sun Tzu had it figured out two and a half millennia ago. See his handy guide below:
Anatomy of a News Article
Headline: This is designed to really get your goat. ‘Righteous indignation’ is a popular one, and the more outrageous the wording the better! It’s a suckerpunch to the feels! You can’t think and feel at the same time, after all.
Main Body: Paragraph after paragraph of padding and drivel designed to assist you in convincing yourself that being cross about the thing is justified and makes you a good person.
Main Body Sub: A very small paragraph hidden away containing the factual meat of the story, so the journalist can say with a straight face, “Propaganda? Us? No, we’re just reporting the news!” You’ll probably skip over this paragraph anyway, because it just doesn’t deliver the goods in terms of making you feel super awesome about yourself.
Sorry, did I say just say propaganda? My bad… the word I was looking for was brainwashing—it’s very easy to do, and even easier to have done to you. Sure, it might start off with a simple false notion that New Zealand has more COVID cases than it really does because the article was translated from Japanese for reasons that needn’t concern us now, but next thing you know, you’re in a tank invading Cardiff, which as far as you’re concerned is absolutely the right thing to do, and totally justifies any means. Those close harmony singing leek eaters sure have it coming! is what you’d probably be saying.
I’m sure this is a theme I will return to often, because as I said, I really like pickles. I actually bought a pack the other day, now I think of it, and I thought there were going to be loads in there, but there were like, five.
Mind you, it never said on the package that it had loads of pickles in there, which brought the day’s total to a dozen and one, not to mention a wholly underwhelming breakfast experience.
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