The Uses and Abuses of Expression

One of the great challenges of life is being known -- and knowing others.

That's why people want to become famous and powerful -- and so it only makes sense to be known as the person you really are, as one of the great imperatives of life -- in knowing who YOU are. And one will never find that out by pretending to be many people; in fact, that is the source of one's confusion, recognized previously as schizophrenia, multiple personalities, or the fragmented personality -- always in conflict with themselves, as well as others.

One of the amusing things about the creation of aliases, was that one of the first abuses of anonymity, was for the mainstream writers to create many "aliases" directing people to their articles, and praising themselves effusively as the greatest personages of all time -- written in their unmistakable style and perspective.

So it is just like the old manipulations of the mainstream media to proclaim that they report the "facts," and what everybody else writes is "opinion," that they are magnanimously entitled to -- rather than that ideologies, propaganda, and marketing are often presented as the "facts," that they wish us to know -- as the political correctness, consensus or conventional wisdom -- whatever they think we ought to believe as the facts -- usually that they above all, are objective, impartial and non-self-aggrandizing.

At the height of the old mainstream media dominance, publications often allowed only reader comments on the content they had previously published as the only things readers could comment on -- as though that was the limits of what could be known, often boasting that that was "all the news fit to print." That's how people learned the abuses of expression -- and suppression, manipulation and control

Labels are not a substitute for thinking things through but are reliable triggers for eliciting knee-jerk reactions that provoke one segment of society to go to war against the other -- to exercise their power and control of the others. That is a temptation very few can resist -- but that is the necessary first step to a truly enlightened society.