Editor’s Note: In modern
American politics, the Right and the neoconservatives have invested
heavily in — and proven to be very adept at — shaping how large
segments of the population understand reality, a concept sometimes
called “perception management.”
This sophisticated
propaganda now influences everything from why Americans distrust
global-warming science to when they go to war, as professor Lawrence
Davidson describes in this guest essay:
There is a postmodern position that
states “reality is a social construct.” In other words, individuals
and groups have their own realities and, according to the
postmodernists, one reality is as true as another.
Certainly there is more than one way to interpret things. It
is because individuals see the world differently and, at least in the
American cultural milieu, have such trouble reconciling those views,
that U.S. divorce rates run at about 50 percent.
Then there is the
inescapable fact that nation states and rival ethnic communities
periodically slaughter each other (and persis… >>>
