False to Facts Association
A reader with the novel numerical but carceral name of New Number Two, makes the following remarks:
Modern advertising is designed to make you want a product regardless of whether the product has any merit or not, as such, it often will not even attempt to explain the merit of a product anymore (old advertisements did). I will give an example. The advertisement showed a supermodel, dressed in a gauzy white dress, with a backdrop of a garden full of flowers, swinging on a swing. That went on for a while, then presented the name of the product, three musketeers candy bar. Not once did they show the candy bar or talk about it’s merits or why you would want one.
He concludes:
If your “news” article starts out with graphic and emotional description, an emotional little story, you are being lied to, expect the whole thrust of the article to be selling you a lie.
To which all, I say, bravo, and hear, hear.
When I was just a young Vulcan, science fiction writers (of all people) introduced me to the theory of a “false-to-facts association.”
The theory ran that human thought is not naturally logical but associative. Associative means that the human brain by nature cannot readily distinguishing between the necessary (what must follow causes in all cases) as opposed to the accidental (what may follow or may not).
Correlation is open to the senses: that is, we can see whether two events happen at the same time. Causation can only be determined after the experience of a large number of cases, where the accidents differ between repeated cases, but the essentials remain the same.
Even a dog by irrational instinct can correlate such effects as the ringing of a dinner bell with dinner, and learn to to salivate. But if a caveman correlates birdsong with the sunrise, it is not until he spends a night in the mountains, out of earshot of birds, and sees the sunrise nonetheless, that he has enough information to make an abstract hence rational deduction that sunrise causes birdsong, not the other way around.
As with external experiences, so with internal. The correlation between emotions and thoughts is partly by nature, party by nurture, mostly by habituation. That is, I know of no human emotion so universal or potent that there is no case in history of some great saint or some great sinner putting it aside, to act in spite of it.
Where the lines of division fall is a matter of debate, but in the general case, it is safe to say, for example, that mother love toward the chubby babe in arms is the default case, and is natural, and expected, or the sexual desire of young men in spring toward shapely and nubile virgins, and is also natural. It is also safe to say that artifice and fad and fashion can modify the sexual reaction in the male, so that such things as painted lips or nylon hose or high heels can exaggerate the male appeal. When taken to an doubtful extreme, fashion can replace natural appeal and become a fetish, as if the shoe were sexy, not the leg.
Neurosis is the technical term for such an habituated unnatural association, where the emotional reaction is no longer proportionate, fitted nor proper to the natural stimulus. When the neurosis is so extreme or disproportionate that the reaction is the opposite of the stimulus, we call this psychosis.
A shoe fetish is an example of a sexual neurosis; homosexuality is an example of a psychosis.
In the homosexual, the natural mating urge and the sexual emotions surrounding have been displaced from the sex with whom one’s own sex can mate, to the sex with whom one cannot. It is for this reason, and no due to any cruelty or prejudice, that homosexual sex acts are called “unnatural” — because they literally are contrary to human nature.
We call sexual acts unnatural when they are contrary specifically to the nature of the sex act, which, by definition, is sexual, that is, involving the mating of the two opposite sexes. Such acts do stimulate the sexual organs, and perhaps, in sad cases, romantic and tender emotions as well, and are related to the accidents of the sex act, in much the same way chewing and swallowing of excretions by a coprophagist is related to nutrition. Namely, certain non-essential externals are mimicked.
The fetishizing of the external properties of sexual allure include such natural things as the nudity prudence would reserve to the wedding bower, or even the nuptial pleasures nature and nature’s author decree to be reserved to the mating act. Pornography is the visual external of marital nudity, and prostitution is the mating act without the mating, and not with one’s lawful mate. All these things are condemned in sane societies, and outlawed by just laws, but they are not called unnatural.
Even though these are not called sexual fetishes, they do indeed associate a healthy and virtuous instinct to an unhealthy and vicious object. They are neurotic in that they lack fitness and proportion between emotion and object. Homosexuality is traditionally condemned more severely in society and punished more severely at law than pornography and prostitution, and rightly so, since the deviance from nature is greater. Neurosis is a bruise; psychosis is a wound.
So there are cases where nurture or habituation can be neurotic, and replace or reverse nature, as well as cases where it simply cannot be done. Perhaps a concerted effort can convince some neurotics to regard unnatural fetishes as natural, but human nature is stubborn, not easily engineered.
Certain trauma, especially being sexually abused as a child, can indeed divert the emotional associations of the sexual passion from a natural object to an unnatural object; but this cannot be done for the whole population. It will never be more than a vanishingly small tithe of the people, no matter how fashionable it becomes, nor what social engineering steps are attempted.
As difficult as it is for the modern mind to believe, the mind is not an utterly blank slate on which anything whatsoever can be written; but then again, even more unbelievable to the modern mind, the mind is not an utterly ironclad clockwork immune to change.
We have instinctive reactions than cannot be wholly obliterated; and we have faculties of reason and learning by which instinct can be redirected to other than their natural objects.
One of those faculties of reason is the gift of speech, the use of words and names.
Humans name things, and define what is meant by a name either by aggregation or by definition. An aggregation is bringing to mind the summary of all the myriad concrete examples of what is meant into a single word, even if one cannot draw a hard and clear line between what to include under that word and what not. A definition draws such a line by identifying genus (which is the common characteristic all similar cases have in common) and the difference (the exclusive and essential characteristic differentiating this case from similar cases).
Calling man a featherless biped identifies his similarity to other two-legged creatures, but differentiates him from birds by his lack of feathers. Likewise, calling man a rational animal identifies his similarity to other living beings, but differentiates him by his faculty of reasoning; or, if you prefer, identifies his similarity to angels and elves and other rational creatures, but differentiates him by being mortal, like other beasts.
To draw a false-to-facts association by means of words, repetition is not needed. Words have both denotations and connotations. The art of misleading by misnaming is the art of finding a word or phrase that denotes a certain thing, but with connotations opposite of the norm. Euphemisms are used to refer to things whose connotations are indelicate to mention, and often used to make something bad sound normal, or, at least clinical; smear-words are used to make something hale and normal sound sinister and bad.
Nearly all political discourse today consists, not of reasoning, but of renaming, so that one’s opponents policies and values are renamed via smearwords negative connotations, and one’s own renamed via euphemisms with positive. Much effort has been spent over many decades to denature the minds of the young, robbing them of reason and common sense, in order for this jejune technique to work.
Likewise, one of those learning faculties is association.
As described above, association works by repetition and reward; merely seeing a smiling girl proffer a cold drink or a smoking cigarette to your lips will associate the brand name of that drink or smoke with a pleasure you wish to revisit.
More to the point, if a typical woman merely sees her peers delighting in some good, and agreeing to its worth, her fear of being excluded or slighted if she does not hasten to agree will associate a brand name with the deep and feminine desire for harmony and conformity, which, despite what you have been taught, is far stronger in the weaker sex, and for reasons too obvious to mention.
Not just commercial advertisements, but nearly all political campaigns, are based, not on reason, but on the mass indoctrination of the unwary into false-to-facts associations.
Indeed, consider any major national issue of the last hundred years, and notice the means used to debate it. Abortion is described as a matter of female freedom and empowerment. The word “choice,” by mere repetition, is meant to be associated in the minds of the unwary with the grisly act. Of course, logically, there is no more of less choice involved, no more freedom or power, than in any other similar act; but it would be grim comedy to advocate smothering one’s old rich uncle in his bed in the name of your choice to end his life, or your power and freedom to come from inheriting his wealth.
Likewise, the entire sexual revolution, which consisted of the systematic dismantling of Christian modesty, decency, chastity, and the overthrow of traditional and time-tested Christian teachings on contraception and divorce, where never once publicly debated in terms of Christ and Antichrist.
Instead the issue was based on a false-to-facts association. Acts of imprudence, immodesty, injustice, cruelty and betrayal, normally associated with adultery and fornication and bastardy, just as long as these acts created opportunity for sexual pleasure for young playboys and philanderers, were merely expressed as freedom and escape from small-minded kill-joy Victory prudery, or an alleged Christian fear of the full richness of human sexuality.
As if making prudent provision for the intended outcome of the act of sexual reproduction, namely, a baby, so that the mother does not mate until and unless the mate is properly vetted and able to provide a stable home for the child — this simple prudence is the act so maligned by so many snide sneers against Puritanism.
If the point of the effort of the Sexual Revolution had been to produce as many bastards as possible, with as few fathers as possible, ruining as many lives as possible, and locking the underclass into permanent misery and poverty, the effort could not have been better calculated.
The Christians, the only race of man ever to make marriage a sacrament, who surround the sacrifice of virginity for the sake of motherhood with more pomp and ceremony than any pagan rite, and who are the only peoples to insist that the bride must consent to the deflowering, were, absurdly enough, accused of fearing sex and romance.
Absurd because we invented romance. Even the name for it comes from Rome. Before us, for the pagans, women were property. For example, the quarrel in the Iliad was not over a man’s beloved wife, but over a slavegirl who was in his part of the war loot.
But slandering us was easy. It was effortless. The Sexual Revolution turned the public square into the Las Vegas strip, step by step, and harlotry was glamorized. Marilyn Monroe poses nude for a porn magazine, and becomes the concubine of the president and his brother, but neither she, nor he, are criticized for it. To the contrary, they are figures lauded and celebrated to this day.
All this was based on a simple, nearly effortless, and very effective trick. Take some sin, and rename it as a freedom. Who can be against freedom? Mock the corresponding virtue to be repression, and call it unhealthy, or, worse, uncool.
Take a supermodel in a gauzy white dress, with a backdrop of a garden full of flowers, swinging on a swing. Instead of advocating for a candy bar, she advocates gross sexual immorality, starting with fornication, moving through divorce and adultery and prostitution, then to contraception, then to the Moloch rituals of abortion and child-murder, then to sodomy and unnatural sexual acts so disgusting that they once could not even be named in public, and culminating in psychotic self-castration and self-mutilations that would make Cybele proud, and men dressed in drag.
All she need do is says these things are new and brave and a matter of God-given Constitutional rights.
To deny the vice-addicts the right to exercise their vices in public, without fear of punishment or scorn, and, indeed, without the fear that some might fail to applaud enthusiastically, is transformed from common sense and common decency into abhorrent bigotry worse than racism merely by the magical word “equal.”
The word does not refer to legal equality, as when rich and poor, white and black, Catholic and Protestant are governed by the same laws impartially enforced. It refers to an equality between virtue and vice, saintliness and sinfulness; that is, it refers now to an studied inability to make even the simplest pragmatic calculation of expected outcomes, or to draw even the most obvious conclusion of moral judgment.
“Equal” now means making law-breaking equal to law-abiding by abolishing the law and inverting the moral code on which all law is based.
All the supermodel in the gauzy dress need do is put, first, a harlot or a child-killer, and next a sodomite or transvestite, and eventually a pederast, into a sitcom or space opera next to a normal person, and have all the normal characters in the make-believe react to the abnormals as if abnormality were normal. The inevitable side-effects of vice and abnormality are never portrayed, nor even mentioned.
Humans, who by and large learn by imitation and, for the sake of their sanity, take most matters on the authority of those they trust. We unthinkingly trust entertainment and fiction to portray truths of the human condition, even during fantastical stories of unusual events. We unthinkingly trust authorities who have not led us astray in the past.
To be betrayed is a deeper wound than any wound dealt by a known enemy. Treason, by definition, can only be committed by allies once trusted, by friends once loved.
The side-effects of the particular chain of cause and effect sexual sins and perversions set in motion are swept into the memory hole. There are no babies, no broken hearts, no shame, no bad results resulting from sexual vices portrayed in the sitcoms or space operas. The whores have hearts of gold and never get venereal disease, and the gays are gay and wise and well-adjusted, and never commit suicide. As if every war film merely showed the ticker-tape parades, without once mentioning soldiers being shot.
The repetition of seeing sodomy portrayed as if it were merely a difference in matters of taste, like preferring blondes to brunettes, conditions the unwary mind into a false-to-facts association. The thing becomes its own opposite.
To smother the absurdity of these false associations, the alteration of speech to Orwellian Newspeak is necessary. In Newspeak, “sex” means both sex and sodomy, which is, technically, not the sex act, and “marriage” means both marriage and gay marriage, which is the opposite of marriage.
All this, merely by having a supermodel smile, and ask the unwary to call sin “freedom” and “equality.”
As with sexual perversion, so too with economic schemes to eat the rich, so too with open borders, so too with global cooling-warming-change-stasis, so too with public health histrionics, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Terror, so to with the brownshirts busily rioting against the fascism which exists nowhere but with them.
Nor is correcting, or even questioning, the association allowed. For example, “marriage equality” cannot be asked in what way, aside from his desire to break the law against sodomy, is it an unequal law to allow the marriages of married couples to be recognized at law, but not to extend that honor to catamites and sodomites? The sodomite, if he marries a woman, will have his marriage be protected by the same laws as other men, impartially. No law forbids men from marrying man, for the same reason no law forbids time travel or eating the moon. What no one can do, no one need forbid.
But once an idea is associated with its opposite, the point is to associate any opposition to that association with hatred, bigotry, White Supremacy. Any opposition to goodthink is thoughtcrime.
The idea of an honest difference of opinion is swept into the memory hole. Heresy is not just a crime, it is a sin, and not open to discussion.
There is no debate over the definition of thoughtcrime, no questioning of what to include and exclude. That is not the way false-to-facts association works.
Our supermodel in the gauzy dress now simply scowls. The light and gay music turns grim and dark. She says that the arguments in favor of prudence, modesty, marriage, family, justice and sanity are all expressions of ignorance, bigotry, hate and White Supremacy.
The idea is not to ask and not to answer any questions. The idea is to rule questions out of the question. The point is to silence, not to convince; to overawe, not to persuade.
It is all merely false-to-facts association, that is, taking some good or sound idea, and, by mere repetition, associating it with bad connotations; or, likewise, taking some foolish, vulgar, criminal or sinful idea and, by mere repetition, associated it with good connotations.
But, as I said above, the association technique only goes so far and lasts so long. Advertisers might be able to convince a fan of cola drinks to switch to lemon-lime, or something, but not to drink urine. A tolerant man might be convinced by such techniques to classify certain sexual sins as private matters, improper for the government to regulate, but not to let schools groom his children for pederasts. A civil rights advocate might be convinced that certain voter security regulations pose too grave a burden to place on the Negro, but not to allow widespread voter fraud abolish democracy altogether.
It must be noted that the use of false-to-facts association is possible only in areas where the victim group is unwary, has no strong opinions, has no real reason to resist or oppose. Hence this type of propaganda technique can never be used honestly to alter tradition.
If I myself do not associate the falsehood with the fact whose connotations I am trying to change, I cannot use the technique to make the change. If I believe that there is an underlying reality which affirms the traditional judgment is correct, the connotations will flow naturally from the judgments. Only if I believe my former judgments are incorrect, or, more to the point, if I believe there is no underlying reality, can I justify attempt to change the connotations of words, using the mesmerism of mass-media propaganda rather than reason.
The very name given this theory implies that there are fact-to-fact associations which should and must be habituated into use, so that not just our reason, but our emotional responses, correctly correspond to reality.
It is rarely stated explicitly, but the issue is about apt and just emotional responses. In times of old, there were emotions regarded as proper and pious, correct and proportionate, associated each with its various object, and it was a vice, not a matter of opinion, to encourage the wrong response. Love was supposed to obtain between mother and child, for example, not the indifference one has to a mass of cells. Disgust was suppose to obtain when contemplating sexual perversion. Patriotism was proper for one’s nation. Piety was proper for holy things. Courtesy toward virgins, kindness toward children, chivalry toward honorable enemies, and so on.
To overthrow these stock emotional responses, one must first convince the unwary that they are arbitrary hence unjust. One cannot have disgust toward perverts, because one’s own sexual lusts are not more natural than his, for there is no nature, no right and wrong, on the grounds that all preferences are conditioned by society. But patriotism toward one’s society is not conditioned by society, it is Nazism and therefore evil.
So Big Brother both argues that one’s emotional responses are arbitrary and subjective, while at the same time, with no sense of shame, argues that the emotional response of hate and contempt toward those sins and insanities Big Brother is encouraging is objectively unjust.
Honest men use reason to convince each other of facts, and rhetoric to hearten each other, and to encourage each other to uphold these hale and natural stock responses. Hypocrites use rhetoric to halt inquiry into the facts, and propaganda techniques to silence opponents, leaving opposing arguments unanswered.
The technique of silencing opposition by means of false-to-facts associations, merely by the word-fetishism of euphemism and smearword, is and must be hypocrisy. It it the core of modern political cultism.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
