Experiencing Technical Difficulties
Life in a city is inherently chaotic – granted, there are laws which govern how everything behaves and, given enough information, it would be possible to simulate every possible scenario and discern what’s happening from the quanta in an electron which composes a polymer in the plastic seat your ass is parked in to the thoughts of the person sitting next to you on the subway – but survival is generally not of grave concern at a given moment… until it is.
… and when your life depends upon situational awareness, you can count on your five senses (along with that sixth sense of cognitive dissonance) but little else: those entrusted with maintaining control over critical situations will restrict the availability of viable information if that’s as much control as they’ve got.
The person sitting next to you? Probably thinking about dinner or the events of the day or what’ll be on the television… but he or she could be thinking about the thirty-pound bundle of explosives and shrapnel in his or her satchel – and you’d be none the wiser if you were depending upon local law enforcement to clue you in to a terrorist attack.
Announcements informed passengers of delays due to “technical reasons,” avoiding anything more specific.
- Suicide bombers kill 38 in Moscow’s subway at MSNBC
2010-03-28
Containment has failed. Keep them calm. Avoid panic.
“It’s tied in with self-esteem,” says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. “We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels.”
- Why We Lie at Tehran Times
2010-03-09
Preserve the façade of safety. Everything is under control.
Control requires complicit obedience and conditioned responses (the kind which a novel situation would preclude) – some situations must be down-played to prevent stampedes and ensure continuity, even if that means stifling the truth and inviting further casualties: the governing organism which demands freedom in exchange for security must not be exposed for its lies.
Keep calm and carry on.
i think the “why we lie” article describes people’s lying habits pretty well and gives an accurate explanation — people lie to preserve some illusion of their ideal self. the principle might be extrapolated to include people’s views of their countries as well/religions, i guess anything they can associate themselves with.
another mechanism for putting yourself first seems to be relegating negative behavior (violence, theft, an instance of stupidity, etc.) as atypical or externalizing it. ex: “i wouldn’t have stolen if the economy wasn’t so bad.” “I was tired so i screwed up on the interview.” what do you think?
I agree – and I am extending this (perhaps very limited) metaphor of government-as-narcissist to include the potential for narcissistic injury (i.e. violent reactions to self-proclaimed anarchists who are not actively violating the law); consider the distribution of deliberate misinformation a kind of passive-aggressive expression of narcissistic rage (and the corollary: annihilation of the government’s constituency as the ultimate expression of control)…