"The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation."

BLOT: (25 Mar 2012 - 02:29:46 PM)

"The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation."

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can't possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it's true. [Don DeLillo. White Noise (Kindle Locations 1324-1331). Penguin Group.]

I would say that you should extend this past just families, include any circle of close knit people, and there is a way that wrong information explodes and is enjoyed and enhanced that it seems almost miraculous, like all those broken memes and cancerous thoughts live and breathe best in an inbred environment rather than in the world at large. And lately, it seems like so much of the 24-hour news cycle, the slavering rant-centric aspects of media, the pundits with branding and multi-modal existence, and the "churches" of new information that want to preach a gospel in which their viewers are embracing The Word and The Word was with them...it seems like so much of this is directed toward creating erstwhile close-knit groups as core attendants. Form a family and then information can be sold in packets, and even if the packet is largely sour and wrong, then they'll accept it, because that's what families do...they will even get mad at reality for disagreeing with The Family, for being less "real" than your family-sized packet of untruth.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: March 2012