Distortional Representation: When a statement is made by a person with one intention, but is twisted around by a receiving person, or people, and repeated in a provocative way to mean something different. As a result, no amount of come-back explanation will then be accepted in support of the originally intended meaning.
Distortional Representation can be accidental or deliberate. An accidental example might be a text message or an email, sent with one intention, but interpreted by the recipient in a completely different way. This is quite common and is a result of not being able to interpret other simultaneous signals, such as, facial expressions or voice intonation. Another reason for misinterpretation, could be the mood of the recipient at the time of reading the message. If the person is already feeling annoyed, this angst could be conveyed to what is being read. This is why it is important, when you send a written message, to re-read it in different ways, to see if it could be misunderstood. One way to help reduce misunderstanding, is to use emojis 🙂 or abbreviations (lol). Accidental examples:
‘If you’d done what I told you, we wouldn’t be in this mess!’
‘If you’d done what I told you, we wouldn’t be in this mess!’ (lol)
‘Will you tell Steve…’
‘Could you ask Steve…’
Deliberate examples of the type we typically see in media reporting, are like these. Notice too, the use of upward intonation, at the end of the replies, to convey indignation in the form of a question:
Person A: “I believe we should always try to resolve conflict through discussion.”
Person B: “So you’re saying, you wouldn’t hit anyone?”
Person A: “It would be more cost effective to use some of the left-over paint for this job.”
Person B: “So you’re suggesting we should make do with out-of-date and inferior materials?”
Person A: “We need a time for reflection before acting inappropriately.”
Person B: “So you’re just going to do nothing?”
- The ‘Plausible Deniability Pack’.
- The ‘Unthreatening Hand Gesture Training DVD’ (with free mirror).
- The ‘Paul Daniels Misdirection Manual’.
- The Groucho Marx, ‘Ask and Answer All Your Own Questions’ (worksheets).
Anything that frightens and causes panic in people, provides an opportunity to bring in sweeping changes, that under other circumstances, would never be permitted by a society.
- Losing faith in experts, when we were convincingly told something that later turned out to be incorrect.
- Feeling that our opinions will be overruled – ‘they’ will do it anyway.
- Feeling innately uncomfortable with something we are told is for our own good.
- Not being able to relate our own experience, to the information being promulgated.
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Going back a few years, the first time we began to openly lose trust in our ‘experts’, was around the BSE cattle crisis. Other instances followed, such as insistence on an MMR vaccine, rather than separate vaccines, where expertise started to sound more arrogant than informed.
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We have also now reached a point where politicians have stopped caring whether or not they will be ‘found out’ when telling us porkies and despite their lies being quite transparent, we have got used to this being ‘the way it is’.
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Imposing restrictions on a populace, because of the generated perception of personal threat, enables a government to quickly pass into law, measures that could be far-reaching in detrimental ways to, for example, freedom of speech and information, or human rights.
- When a politician talks about ‘hard working families’, it comes across as their patronising way of trying to placate an underclass of people who’s lives they know little about – the well-to-do, standing shoulder to shoulder with the proletariat and often, financially dispossessed.
It’s very challenging to write an article on this subject, because I know that everyone has a personal opinion, based on their own understanding of the reality they experience. We always gravitate towards those who agree with our own opinions. You might call it a tribal approach to living. Personally, I can see, and to varying degrees understand, merits in most opposing opinions on a variety of subjects. No one has the perfect answer and no one really holds the truth. In fact, truth only becomes accepted as truth, when enough people agree on something – regardless of whether that truth stands up over time. Unfortunately, we have developed a world where ‘fighting’ for one’s truth then takes over. Instead of the truth unveiling itself, it comes down to a battle of the physically superior. The people who can bomb the shit out of any opposition hold the rightful truth.
In 2011, I gave a talk to a small group of scientific researchers, in Barcelona, called ‘Quantum Mass Superstructures’. A year later, this became a book by the same name, with the additional strap line of: ‘creating the world you experience’. Within this book, I talked about how the world was now full of different creative thoughts and opinions and how the advent of the world wide web (Internet) had enabled all these views to be expressed and easily accessed. However, build-ups of strong views would ultimately meet in varying degrees of collaboration or opposition, often creating equal divisions of beliefs about reality. At such times, you either get great positive, and creative changes, or horrifying and upsetting, negative disturbances.
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