Originally circulated on 18 December 2020
Aweh fellow Ruminants & Groupies in Lock Down Level 1
Aweh from day 265 of lock down – now level 1.
An appropriate theme for Ruminant Pink Friday ™ are the various tools we all use to avoid facing reality. Reality can sometimes be an unpleasant place and so the concept of trying to sweep inconvenient truths under the carpet can be very appealing and even rewarding. There are thus various tools we use to deliberately avoid knowing things we don’t want to know as shown in the figure below:
https://theethicalskeptic.com/tag/nelsonian-knowledge/
We are beset with so many unfolding scandals and in the inevitable investigations that follow we get to see the various tools of deception being applied as those involved try to avoid facing the consequences and get exonerated and rewarded.
The crudest and simplest way of avoiding reality is apathy followed by willful blindness where you carefully seek to ensure that you can try to maintain the appearance of never having been exposed to the truth. It is the “I didn’t know” defense and of course begs the question of whether you should have known. If you are trying to save your skin it is maybe better to be labelled incompetent rather than complicit. The narrative that “you did nothing wrong” can then be used. There may be consequences but you can maintain dignity and potentially leave with a pat on the back and potentially something in your pocket.
We then move to the concept of Nelsonian knowledge and Nelsonian inference which expands the concept of willful blindness where ignorance is carefully contrived.
Nelsonian Knowledge (Inference)
/philosophy : pretense : knowledge obfuscation/ : Nelsonian knowledge takes three forms:
1. a meticulous attentiveness to and absence of, that which one should ‘not know’,
2. an inferential method of avoiding such knowledge, and finally as well,
3. that misleading knowledge or activity which is used as a substitute in place of actual knowledge (organic untruth or disinformation)
Given this toolkit one can create a rigorous process to create alternative narratives which suit your purpose as described in the figure below:
In this way organisations can use this process to cultivate ignorance and contrive an apparent reality to suit their purposes by marginalising the true experts by the use of an apparently rigorous and fair process.
The only flaw in all of this is that scientific reality does not concern itself with human processes or dominance hierarchies and the true reality intervenes at some point sometimes with very unpleasant ramifications.
However, if one can succeed in leaving a mess behind while exiting with dignity and something in your pocket – where is the harm in that?
Finally I would like wish you all a great festive season and a better 2021and Ruminant Pink Friday ™ will continue in 2021.
Thank you very much for the many helpful suggestions and input which I’m researching and please keep the submission ideas flowing.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 