“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” [spoken by J.D. Vance]
When the CNN host, Dana Bash, noted that he had used the word “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
Maggie Astor, Vance Sticks By Pet-Eating Claims and Says He’s Willing to ‘Create Stories’, The New York Times, Sept. 15, 2024
Updated 1:20 p.m. ET.
In the biblical motif it is the ‘snake’ or ‘serpent’ that tempted Eve. If we took the biblical story literally there are serious problems we have in our modern world. But if the uneducated thinks that a person can avoid the literal problem by rejecting the modern belief system, as in dismissing it in total, they are ignorant of how much of their own thinking is actually modernly constructed (most of everyone’s thoughts in the present).
Each of the terms in the above sentence has or infers exact meaning, according to Semantics, what meaning is in language, and Hermeneutics, methodology of interpretation for texts usually but also non-verbal communication. These fields of education are also supported and enhanced by other fields of learning, such as Presuppositional Analysis (arguments conveying meaning), Semiotics (signs conveying meaning), and Exegesis (textual entries conveying true meaning). It was once presupposed by conservative scholars that these fields are the problem when attempting to defend a literal meaning. In some cases a literal meaning is true, and this is why ‘the dismissal‘ of past conservative scholars is plainly wrong in the other cases. Neo-conservative scholars, particularly Americans in the Heritage Foundation, have done everything to prevent faithful conservatives understanding this great distortion of conservative beliefs. The distortions arise in the problems identified in American cultural and intellectual history, and, in particular, anti-intellectualism or the politics of uncaring (cynicism).
These fields are the frameworks whereby we each determine what is a true meaning. Presuppositional Analysis demonstrates true meaning by demonstrating false meanings in fallacies. Semiotics demonstrates true meaning by demonstrating false meanings in memes (also a field of study called memetics). Exegesis demonstrates true meaning by demonstrating false meanings in how each might read a text. Hermeneutics demonstrates true meaning by demonstrating false meanings in secondary arguments, to falsely justify both literal and non-literal meaning, which have been soundly (as in logic) shown to be false. Semantics demonstrates true meaning by demonstrating false meanings in the primary framework of meaning. Hence, we have to be educated in the relevant frameworks of thinking:
Meaning (primary framework): In philosophy—more specifically, in its sub-fields semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics—meaning “is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify”;
Constructionism: A framework which could be a reference to 1) an educational philosophy developed by Seymour Papert, 2) a theory of how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts, or 3) a conservative type of legal or constitutional interpretation. At its logical base is a view that meaning is never revelation, but always constructed by the person, as cognition;
Literalism: Used in different contexts, this framework is where most of the confusion exists in the thinking. The confusion is said (falsely) to be defeated by several faulty frameworks: dogma, deflection, and denial.
American Modernism: This is the framework that ends up promoting false literalist beliefs, both as materialist and non-materialist meanings. The faulty framework does this primarily by 1) naïvely rejecting past conventions without understanding the past, which leads to 2) opposing Historicism, which is to simply reject a process of studying the past, and 3) a popular and confused thinking in utopianism. All of these sub-frameworks of modernity contain many truths and many falsehoods;
Critical Realism (philosophy of the social sciences): a philosophical approach to understanding science, and in, particular, towards social science by opposing views of science as concerned with identifying causal mechanisms. Why this framework is important is that it destroys the application of direct realism to falsely justify an argument of literalism as “reality”;
Perception: A key framework which shows that the framework of naïve realism (also known as direct realism or perceptual realism) often does not work when attempting to secondarily justify a false argument.
So, to circle back to the lying of J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump; persons get away in intense lying by appealing to the plain ignorance of the uneducated, the opposite state of affairs of education, and, as well, the willfully ignorant, those professionals who should know better because they claim to be educated. Too often this state of affair is simply confusion in (originally) the Catholic theological distinction between vincible and invincible ignorance.
So, Why the Uneducated Believe Intense Liars? It is because the uneducated are uneducated. This is the very reason why militant rightwing believers, as uneducated or the willfully ignorant, want to hollow out the curricula of the humanities and social sciences of our education systems.
Featured Image: Young business man holding his two masks. ID 13298147 | Liar © Barelkodotcom | Dreamstime.com
Neville Buch
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