Dr. Andy Farnell's Article on Societal Disorganised Attachment and the Role of Social Control Media
HAVING just mentioned an example of bad, incredulous journalism, the time is right to introduce Dr. Farnell's latest article (dated yesterday). An excerpt:
BBC reporter Marianna Spring has extensively covered trolling. In particular her coverage of "disinformation" and "conspiracy theories" around victims of terrorists bombings is worth thinking about. In the fashion of Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux, she lets victims and perpetrators speak honestly of harms and feelings. There are cohorts of people who, despite seeing the horrific scars and hearing first-hand accounts, still refuse to believe the victims. They are fixated on fantastic explanations involving "crisis actors" and "government fit-ups". We note this is congruent with disorganised post-traumatic symptoms exhibited by victims of severe abuse and as such can be considered a form of dissociation, or loss of touch with reality commonly associated with psychosis. Psychosis is linked profoundly to our attachment relationships (see this article). The ability of our earliest caregives will shape our sense of reality, or lack thereof. Bowlby describes it as 'Knowing what we are not supposed to know, and feeling what we are not supposed to feel.'Returning to the societal scale for a moment. Radical contestation and incredulity are ancient phenomena. Historians call them "interregnums". They follow big upsets like great wars, pandemics or major shifts of religious norms, scientific perspective or political might. These are times when old values and truths are put on trial. Socrates, often taken as the exemplar of sceptical enquiry, lived in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War, a deeply traumatic event in Greek history. Indeed, we take scepticism to be a virtue in scientific enquiry. In the age of AI deep-fakes and "fake news" it is becoming an even greater asset that we want to instil in our children. So when does it become pathological?
The article is quite long and typos were still being fixed as recently as last night. We'll soon have Part III of "Technology: rights or responsibilities?" (part 1, part 2) from Dr. Farnell. █