Concept, Semantics, and Strategies for the Level Playing Field

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Marketoonist is a cartoon provider on marketing issues. Tom Fishburne is usually highly critical of current marketing practice. I support his conclusions and his work, and pay for the license to use his cartoons. In this blog piece are three cartoons to get to the point of needing a level playing field, if not as a society which is highly prejudice and uninformed, at least a level playing field from the State. It is a killer idea which will eventually consume the ghosts of past thinking which, currently, keep dismissing, unintelligently, the historical movement of both intertwined idealism and realism. Simple binaries creates stupid thinking.

Image: Marketoonist 240108.highres.genz. Licensed paid.

Unfortunately, the stupidity continues into second guessing what we think “The Other” thinks (Emmanuel Levinas). The public relations industry disregards the critical question of who is controlling the narrative and for what benefit, and merely goes to the mechanics of what messaging has the greatest appeal to the selected target audience. It is empty thinking, particularly as it goes to the idea of a generational mindset. Who profits in such thinking?

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The stupidity is seen more clearly in the public relations exercises for commercial or political purposes. All that is gain in such surveying of the public is prejudicial thinking which has no (or too little) relationship to big ideas and what is commonly understood as reality. This is deliberately so, because what is at work is privileging certain and much narrower messaging, one that grossly discriminate and exclude other legitimate interests (Jürgen Habermas). So, how can we work the Concept, Semantics, and Strategies for the Level Playing Field?

Concept, Semantics, and Strategies for the Level Playing Field

by Dr Neville Buch (MPHA, Queensland; a registered director in Humanist Australia)

1. Thinking in a simple binary of religion versus secularity only confuses on what is happening on the political landscape (states of affair) and changes in the political landscape (reform). Behind the simple binary of religion versus secularity are also too simplistic binaries, e.g. idealism versus realism.

2. The confusion of a simple binary is a political device to deliberately confuse the public away from understanding political options intelligently.

3. The State needs to act as a level playing field, treating all substantive belief systems fairly, even as the society may be preferential in the shifting tides between worldviews.

4. The option of a prevailing political worldview is never a simple binary but as follows (contemporary scholarly description):

A. Established Tradition: which is resistant to reform, e.g. Hobbes’ Leviathan, Burkean conservatism, Buckley’s neo-conservatism (although neo-conservatism is more reactionary);

B. Utopian: a movement to a singular ideal system, e.g. Marx’s end of state, anarchism;

C. Liberal: with a presumption for the level playing field, and there are several options theorised:

i. tabula rasa and tolerance, i.e. Locke;

ii. utilitarian choice and scientific neutrality, i.e. Mill, and Rawls (added the principle of veiled ignorance on all identities)

iii. closed constitutionalism with the fixed choice of perceived origins of the people (res publica), i.e., Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln;

iv. open constitutionalism, negotiated in periodical reform between relevant worldviews for common grounds, i.e. Habermas’ dialogical approach.

5. The last option (iv. open constitutionalism) delivers, for most of the society and the political health of the state, the best case of a level playing field. The dialogical approach works from removing the privilege status for any grouping.

6. Understanding the best option (iv. open constitutionalism) means moving away from any singular binary that confuses the conversation for reform. This is the insight of Habermas’ communicative action.

Documents:

Symposium Concept of Level Playing Field and Interorganisational Dialogue

Semantics and Strategies for the Level Playing Field

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Neville Buch

Professional Historian at Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc.

Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.

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