Presentation and Duplicity Touching on Freedom

As touched on earlier, in the first post of this blog, we are a society that largely revolves around the superficial.

No doubt this is, to a great degree, a requisite when one considers what tools are at the disposal of the finite and fallible men and women with regard to their capacity to discern and decipher all the information their senses ingest by the moment every sentient moment of their lives. Generalizations, prejudices and other such filters are a key mainstay to what we consider human sanity. Even when working on software design work must be completed with a regard for the physical capacity of the various physical components of the machine the program is operating on. Discernment, with it's filtering and selectivity, enables us to at least gain a slight idea of the small path, no matter how distorted or blurry it may be, that lies in front of our line of perception.

Enter the nuance of presentation and the capacity for duplicity, pretending. Hypocrisy is literally 'pretending' -- Yet there are times when pretending is promoted by society. There are even times I'd advocate such. The whole of polemics, rhetoric and oration and/or acting are dependent on one being able to conjure, at will, the appearance of something not naturally induced. They are things that at times are, at their core, fakery. Where does this leave us?

Consider the sale. Have you ever purchased a product that had an honest and blunt and unflattering, not legally motivated, disclaimer as to the deficiencies of the product you were going to purchase? Or on the opposite side. Have you found a product to be more satisfying simply because the image it held was one that either seemingly more effectively communicated to you or just made you feel better? Few have ever been very successful at any enterprise when they lacked completely any knowledge of the science of appearance or presentation. Yet on the other hand many people have created entire movements based on nothing more than an assertion that they consistently trumpeted before people in a manner that turned their previously utterly unsupportable assertions into truth, into the core of entire entities that greatly changed the course of human history.

Australia. The father of their great historical gold rush was a master of this. The man literally talked his way into success. With no real evidence for gold anywhere he talked a man into committing himself to panning for some time in a river. After a great deal of work being done by this man they produced a menial residue of gold. But that was all this man needed. He proclaimed it a victory and with that and his mouth and people skills he started a gold rush on little more than a hunch and a self forced PR program. People rushed to the scene. Enough came and the fever lasted long enough that strikes eventually were made. All this from a man who asserted the unverifiable, but did it for long enough that probability caught up with him, and did so in his favor. The man didn't really prospect himself but was able to convince the British Crown that his efforts deserved a portion of the fees paid for gold retrieved.

France. Mr. Suez was also a master of the sale. This time, however, Mr. Suez happened to be putting on a show that, as probability would have it in this instance, could never be a self-fulfilling 'hy-prophesy' in the manner in which it was sold with regard to the Panama Canal. Bankrupting or impoverishing a large portion of the French middle class is not generally an intended consequence of those who have a bona fide belief in the virtue of that which they promote.

The question then comes, seemingly, to two things. Balance and properly placed faith. It may well be that balance could never exist if there was no truth at all on which faith could be placed.

So I suppose what I may be advocating is the fact that salesmanship becomes hypocrisy when we are either lacking proper motivation OR when we are not sufficiently focused on constantly refining our positions based upon the truth. We must be willing to change when such is required by the prongs of truth, or to stand our ground when such is divinely dictated. The frightening thing to realize, however, is that those who are truly good at presentation, those who have it down to a science, can rather adeptly imitate the appearance of just such judgments. While at times it seems we cannot trust our own eyes we must remember that we cannot, in reality, absolutely trust anything finite or human. Whether they are physical/empirical observations or they are the paradigms through which we are instructed to ingest this world and it's stimuli we must ever be vigilant.

It seems eternal vigilance is the price of freedom precisely because a knowledge of things as they really are is eternaly tied to our capacity to act in any fashion approaching true and independent agency.

--Find the Hive