THE USE OF SUGGESTION TO HACK OUR REASON AND EXPERIENCE – EVEN OUR SELF PRESERVA

THE USE OF SUGGESTION TO HACK OUR REASON AND EXPERIENCE – EVEN OUR SELF PRESERVATION.

While I have trouble with subtle emotions – particularly confusion and fear – which I don’t really feel in combination – I have a very good logic and lie detector. Which is why continental language bothers me so much. It’s like a dysfunctional alcoholic is trying to rope me into some bullshit story in order to sell me shit I don’t want at a discount just for the sake of not offending him. It takes advantage of the suspension of disbelief to use suggestion by bypassing our experience, reason, criticism and judgement, and abusing our western familial altruistic trust response.

So I basically can’t understand anything because I never suspend my disbelief, abandon experience, reason, or judgement, and as such cannot experience the suggestion.

Originally, some people may recall, I wasn’t sure I needed to solve the problem of Truth, but it turned out to be the most important problem I did solve, and helped me restate my concept of ‘calculation’ as ‘operationalism.

Over the past two years I’ve been thinking about the means of our deception – do I need to solve it and do I want to solve it? Why does loading, framing, overloading and suggestion work so well when we are in an audience whether in church, in school, sitting round the campfire, being spoken to directly by someone in authority or whom you respect or whom you love, listening on the radio, watching in a play or movie in the theatre, or cruising the internet? Why are we suggestible (trust) and why are we not suggestible (untrust)?

I recognized early that overloading caused us to resort to intuition, and that once engaging intuition we had surrendered reason. But I did not understand the trust response, nor the suspension of disbelief response, nor the effect of combining the trust response, suspension of belief response, combined with loading, framing, overloading – and the most important of all: the submission to the pack response when we are members of an audience.

Basically if you can find a way to directly appeal to our moral cognitive biases you can hack our altruism, reason, experience, and even sense of preservation.

We are terribly suggestible creatures.

Hence the value of truth – raising the cost of untruth such that only truth remains. Just as we raised the cost of violence, theft, fraud, and in many cases, free riding, such that only productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer free of externality remains.

We created the market in steps. First violence. Then Theft. Then fraud. Then free riding.

It’s time to improve the market again by prohibiting suggestion by requiring truth in all matters of the commons.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine