The reflections, musings, and investigations of one Suvian Quilmann...

Saturday, December 31, 2005


Quotes from the West

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." ~ Aldous Huxley, A Case of Voluntary Ignorance

"A substantial part of political discourse is devoted to obscuring the realities of the 'national interest'." ~ Noam Chomsky

"They who have put out the people's eyes, reproach them for their blindness." ~ John Milton

"The pledge: to let neither lethargy of mind or body become habit." ~ Suvian Quilmann

"Business succeds rather better than the state in imposing restraints upon individuals, because its imperatives are disguised as choices.: ~ Walton Hale Hamilton

"The best journalism arises when official sources disagree" ~Robert McChesney

"The historian is just another dim figure trudging along in another part of the procession...[and] the point in the procession at which he finds himself determines his angle of vision over the past." ~ E.H. Carr, What is History?

"The question of what we do in life is important, but how we do it is perhaps more. Remember that, and the key to fulfillment is always within your grasp." ~ Suvian Quilmann

"Great writers are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote." ~ F.R. Leavis

"Science is a selective system of cognitive orientations to reality." ~ Talcott Parsons

"The people who own the country ought to govern it." John Jay, Chief Justice of the United States (1789-1795), and a founding father

"The hand-mill gives us a society with a feudal lord; the steam-mill gives us a society with an industrial capitalist." ~ Karl Marx

"A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy is the encouragement of a hospitable climate for investment in foreign nations." ~ President Eisenhower, 1953 State of the Union address

"When faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will wind up with neither." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"The map is not the territory." ~ Alfred Korzybski

"Words form the thread on which we string our experiences." ~ Aldous Huxley

"The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move forward." ~ Robert Pirsig, Lila, p.430

"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business." ~ John Dewey

"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." ~ A.J. Liebling



~ Quotes from the East ~

"The mind is like an empty vase - fill it with thoughts, desires, attachments, and it can no longer stand upright." ~ Suvian Quilmann

"To worry in anticipation or to cherish regret for the past is like the reeds that are cut and wither away." ~ Buddhist saying

"Modesty is about demeanor, not about vision or goals. It does not mean the lack of commitment or leadership." ~ Ban Ki-Moon, 9th secretary general of the U.N.

"We believe that those people who make efforts to free their countries should not be regarded as terrorists." ~ Manouchehr Mottaki, Iranian Foreign Minister

"If the offiicial version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt. And if, during this review, it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?" ~ Manouchehr Mottaki, Iranian Foreign Minister, speaking at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust (Dec. 2006)

"The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife." ~ Northwest Coast saying



Dialogues with Greco,

"On The Institute for Propaganda Analysis"

...and the absurdity of the notion...

Greco: Suvian, if I were to ask you to define propaganda, how would you do so?

Suvian: Hmm...propaganda is something like the intentional manipulation of information so that events, or a group of people, are cast in a certain light...usually to the advantage of the group doing the manipulating and to the disadvantage of who or what is being portrayed.

Greco: Nice...there is another definition of propaganda which I have come across that I particularly like. Propaganda is "any attempt to win acceptance for a cause, system, or state, either by praise of the thing itself, or by vilification of its known and unknown alternatives." (1) The word has picked up negative connotations over the years (particularly since WWII), so in modern times, you won't see governments actively acknowledging the fact that they use it, even though they do.

Suvian: Why not?

Greco: Well, if you think about it, it is ultimately self-defeating to do so. Giving people the awareness that the information they receive about the government and its purported enemies has been actively manipulated and created to portray the relationship as such involves a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that may lead people to question the intentions of their government, which defeats the purpose of propaganda in the first place.

Suvian: I see. Then how does propaganda work?

Greco: Propaganda works on the principles of negative and positive association. When our country takes action against a perceived enemy or threat, we believe that it is natural for us to do so, because we are the ones who are doing good, and are protecting our way of life (positive association), just as it is natural for the recipients of our actions to be in the wrong because they threaten what we stand for (negative association). This is achieved through the manipulation of the societal norms which are inculcated into all of us from a very early age (e.g. through parenting, education, exposure to the mass media, etc.).

Suvian: I see. And how does this relate to cognitive dissonance?

Greco: Let me provide an analogy. When you feel dizzy, what is your natural reaction?

Suvian: To try and shake it off, I suppose.

Greco: Yes. Cognitive dissonance is like that dizziness. When we are presented with information which contradicts what seems for us to be "the natural order of things", we may begin to feel that something is not right. Cognitive dissonance sets in, and we try to shake it off as quickly as possible so that things will go back to being "normal".

Suvian: So in a sense, cognitive dissonance is an almost physiological reaction to having those negative and positive associations somehow shaken from their "correct" places.

Greco: Yes. And it is also a sign that something is somehow wrong in the information that we have received, and we should investigate why it came about. But such investigations are not encouraged by those who uphold the norms of the status quo. Such an act could even be perceived as a threat in itself...

Suvian: Earlier, you said that in modern times, governments don't openly acknowledge the use of propaganda. Was there a time when they did?

Greco: Oddly enough, there was. Before WWII, there was a government institution whose purpose was to study and analyze how propaganda works. It was named The Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), and it was established in 1937.

Suvian: How did it come about?

Greco: At that time, there was a widespread interest, particularly among intellectuals, in the uses of propaganda, especially in light of the fanfare of Nazi propaganda, and the IPA was created largely in response to those interests. A major goal of the IPA was to give people the intellectual tools necessary to understand the workings of propaganda, and in the process develop their critical thinking skills so that they would not be subject to it.

Suvian: How did it go about doing that?

Greco: The IPA produced several books, such as The Fine Art of Propaganda, and Propaganda: How to Recognize and Deal with it. The IPA created many educational programs, and texts were made to be used in high schools and universities across the country.
(2) Initially, the IPA's efforts met with success, but that success was to be short-lived.

Suvian: Reason being?

Greco: Well, the IPA began to receive criticism that its efforts were creating skeptics, not critical thinkers, skeptics who may begin to analyze with too much scrutiny other areas of society, such as education, military authority, the church, and advertising, for example. Furthermore, there was the impending approach of WWII, which began to cast the IPA in a new light.

Suvian: How so?

Greco: It is no surprise that the use of propaganda peaks during times of war, and faced with the realization that America too would necessarily use propaganda to boost its own war effort, the IPA began to represent an increasing dilemma for U.S. interests. Left intact, the IPA could ostensibly bring about cognitive dissonance among the segments of the population it had influenced (i.e. the up-and-coming "secular priesthood"), thus undermining the U.S. war effort. It is for these reasons, I believe, that the IPA was forced to shut its doors.

Suvian: And when was that?

Greco: 1941. The offical reason was lack of funds, not the impending war. It seems more likely that the very notion of the IPA became increasingly counter-productive to those spearheading U.S. interests, and as a result, was shut down.

Suvian: In retrospect, it's amazing that the IPA existed at all.

Greco: Yes it is. In sum, this case reveals, yet again, cognitive dissonance in action. When people are given the methods to analyze and understand how propaganda is used in other countries, it is ok. But when those same methods are used to analyze our actions, it becomes inadmissible, off-limits, out-of-bounds. Thus, the absurdity of the notion of the IPA, which is a double-edged sword best left unforged.


(1) Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought, p.381
(2) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p.106

Monday, December 26, 2005


Notable quotes from Gore Vidal’s Creation

"Until I met the Buddhists, I did not think it possible for a religion or philosophy or worldview of any complexity to exist without a theory of creation, no matter how imprecise." ~p.290

"At the core of the Buddhist system there is an empty space which is not just the sought-after nirvana. It is perfect atheism." ~p.293


"Out of injured self-esteem, the Greek is always ready to betray his native land." ~p.324

"Wear a mask too long and you will come to resemble it." ~p.354

"You must convince them that your way is their way and that the chains which you have forged for them are necessary ornaments." ~p.401

"The wise man has no ambitions. Therefore, he has no failures. He who never fails always succeeds. And he who always succeeds is all-powerful." ~p.419

"There is no better way of getting a man to let down his guard than to mention his rivals."~p.460

"What I am considered to be and what I am are two different things. Like the fish, which is one thing in the water, and another on the plate." ~p.461

"You serve that very peculiar god who created evil so that he would have an excuse to torture his other creations." ~p.465

"There is not a society on earth that does not perpetuate ancient customs which profoundly embarrass thoughtful contemporaries." ~p.472

"When I am considerate, Master, what do I do?"
"You do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." ~p.491

"To learn and not to think over what you have learned is perfectly useless. To think without first having learned is dangerous." ~p.499

"When the vase is empty, it stands upright, and is very beautiful. But when it is filled, the vase rolls to one side and everything that was in it spills onto the ground, which is not beautiful. Well, I am that empty vase. I may not be filled with power and glory, but I am upright." ~p.502

"We can't conceive a god who takes an immortal soul, allows it to be born once, plays a game with it, then passes judgement on it and condemns it to pain or pleasure forever." ~p.519

"Never go to war against a poor country, because no matter how it turns out, you lose." ~p.541