Systematic misrepresentation by officiants

Marrying Strategic White Holes with Problematic Black Holes (Part #5)

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Whether as problematique or resolutique, there are strange commonalities to the discourse by officiants in their "representation" of the challenge and opportunity:

• unquestionable insight, namely the sense in which officiants have especially privileged understanding of the:
  • resolutique, and are to be considered to be identified in some way with that as a strategic answer, irrespective of views to the contrary
  • problematique, and are to be considered the most relevant in framing the methodological questions and challenges it implies, irrespective of views to the contrary
    
    
• global consensus as a moral obligation, namely the problem is so great or so urgent (as we should all agree), that it is absolutely inappropriate to question the framing offered by the officiant. There is a sense in which the officiants endeavour to play a card which will trump every other argument, or undermine the manner in which they are currently positioned on the moral high ground. This modality is reminiscent of that of individual religions seeking global adherence to their particular belief -- a pattern now strangely emulated by science, as separately argued (The Consensus Delusion: mysterious attractor undermining global civilization as currently imagined, 2011).
  
  
• ungrounded appeals, primarily of value for public relations purposes:
  • addressed in part to nonexistent collective entities, namely those whose very existence is in reality questionable ("global community", "international community") and who are unable to "receive" such communications
  • appeal for resources (given the urgency again), namely the need for everybody to contribute to the budget of those responding to the problematique through some strategic resolutique. This is seen as a totally justified means of by-passing the inappropriateness of other financial streams and priorities -- to which some may (irresponsibly?) accord greater relative priority. The appeal may be phrased in terms of "if only people would contribute X" then particular lives could be saved. Persuasive images of the suffering are presented to that end -- images to which "no one with any humanity" can be indifferent
  • unrealistic articulation of strategic proposals, failing to take into account factors which have mitigated in the past against more than their token implementation (Recognizing the Psychosocial Boundaries of Remedial Action: constraints on ensuring a safe operating space for humanity, 2009)
    
    
• revalidation of the role of the officiant through the process of articulating that which is beyond question. Any failure in this respect is viewed as undermining a role vital to safeguarding human lives
  
  
• act now -- save lives -- don't think, or question the need !

Missing from the process is any recognition of the manner in which urgency is exploited to distort communication regarding problematique or resolutique. This takes several forms:

• focus on the short-term (as noted), precluding any consideration of the longer term (as in the framing by The Economist). Forget the future, the problem is now
  
  
• designing out factors of relevance to evaluation of the situation (Uncritical Strategic Dependence on Little-known Metrics: the Gaussian Copula, the Kaya Identity, and what else? 2009). As made remarkably clear there, in the case of climate change, an official report explicitly set aside the population factor in the Kaya Identity:
  

  The challenge - an absolute reduction of global GHG emissions - is daunting. It presupposes a reduction of energy and carbon intensities at a faster rate than income and population growth taken together. Admittedly, there are many possible combinations of the four Kaya identity components, but with the scope and legitimacy of population control subject to ongoing debate, the remaining two technology-oriented factors, energy and carbon intensities, have to bear the main burden....

• failure to acknowledge the extent to which:
  • present suffering has been "designed in" by previous systemic neglect in a pattern which will in all probability be perpetuated in the future
  • indifference to suffering has been institutionalized. This is evident to a degree in the tardy limited responses to the earthquake disaster in Nepal (with fatalities exceeding those in the Mediterranean in the same week), as has been evident with previous natural disasters

The naivety or cynicism of officiants is especially evident in the assumption that they appear to make that their role is as respected as it may have been in the past. Very active debates address the challenge of the democratic deficit however. The point is usefully made by the cover theme of a recent issue of Newsweek (17 April 2015): Democracy isn't working, as asserted by a would-be officiant in this period, namely Tony Blair.

Blair offers the spectacle of a former officiant whose Catholic faith and strategic complicity (which he continues to defend) successfully contributed to the destabilization of the Middle East -- with the ever greater suffering there at this time. Irrespective of the analysis by Blair, the point to be made is the widespread sense that:

The system's broken. Nothing changes. All politicians are the same. Why vote? It's a popular refrain, particularly among the young. People feel cut off from the po9litical process and unrepresented by the political elite. Just 16 per cent of Britons say they trust politicians -- that's even worse than bankers. We're living through a crisis of mainstream politics says Carl Miller at London-based think tank Demos. Voter turnout has been steadily declining in established democracies in Europe, Latin America and the US for the past few decades. (Niall Firth, We the People, New Scientist, 25 April 2015)

Would-be officiants at the engagement and nuptials of problematique and resolutique are no longer credible or trustworthy -- as many surveys indicate. They invite suspicion through what they fail to address (Global Strategic Implications of the "Unsaid": from myth-making towards a "wisdom society", 2003). This has been exacerbated by the revelations of the extent of invasive surveillance by those in power.

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