Talking Past

Frame of reference, communication & perpetual fake opposition in the House of Lies

Language is so central to how we organize and exchange information that it’s easy to look past it. Not surprising - communication is ingrained to the point of seeming instinctive, especially within the same basic culture. Which gets to the point of this post. The need for common frames of reference for language to have practical communication value. And why mismatched frames create significant problems on different levels.

We use sign systems like written and spoken languages to represents things or ideas in standardized ways. So others know what you mean. Obviously words are never perfect recreations of the original thing or idea. But linguistic expression has become pretty refined at getting the gist across. There’s even a word for being good at it: eloquence. But how well language works depends on how well each participant understands what the words mean. Obvious, but often under the radar.

Understanding is layered and nuanced. Making it relevant to world-building - either fiction writing or the House of Lies narrative engineering I look at. Not that the latter isn’t fiction - the difference is that it claims to be true. it starts with the dictionary meanings of a word. Then comes all the contextual levels of meaning. And the endless variations in local usages.

Language can represent certain things as precisely as it does because it can refine, describe, and clarify general terms into a very specific word picture. Don’t get it? Add more qualifiers. And all those clarifications, analogies, descriptors, etc. work because you know what they mean. Mutual familiarity. And the more familiar, the easier language can mentally put you there.

Effective world building stacks up levels of meaning so things have depth and connotations. Mutually reinforcing and legitimating. It’s why the Band described the House of Lies as vertically integrated. Webs of lies supporting and explaining each other. While sailing ever further from reality

The tl,dr is that communicating has two sides. The speaker or writer uses terms he thinks best capture what he’s trying to say. The reader or hearer comprehends what his own conception of those terms adds up to. Common frame of reference usually = good enough.

Michael Cheval, Echo of Misconception, oil on canvas, 2015

When the words don’t resonate in the intended way, miscommunication happens. The examples are endless. Translations, IQ gaps, colloquialisms, typos, etc. Deceivers play on this deliberately, using terms that insinuate things that they themselves don’t accept. Somewhere in-between lies a significant House of Lies version. It’s unwitting like the first and built of false connotations like the second. This is when people inexplicably assume a communicator shares their frame of reference. Even when it’s beyond obvious they don’t.

It comes from the same place as psychological projection. The reflex assumption that one’s own perspective is the same for everyone else. In this case, the values and beliefs implicit in another’s word choices. It’s a base code level reaction more than a conscious one. And why most are naturally more comfortable around those with similar cultures and backgrounds. Frames of reference. And as with any base code element, NPCs really can’t change it.

What brought this to mind is that procrustean ideological binary that’s a constant in House of Lies political narrative. It has many names, not all of which mean the same things, despite interchangeable usage. To be fair, any false binary has to squeeze a lot of ill-fitting items into each fake box. Left-right is the most common form of the canard, but the names are legion - liberal and conservative, left and right, based and woke, communist and capitalist, idealist and realist, Plato and Aristotle, collectivist and individualist, etc.

The terminology is a mess because of centuries of subversion and opportunism. And while they aren’t all the same, historically aware readers will recognize the basic binary. I tend to default to “reality-facing” for one side. Not the most elegant wording, but it captures the core principles of accepting external reality and taking some sort of personal accountability. The other is whatever that intersection of evil and stupid is that spins up endless do what thou wilt appeals to phantasy over reality.

In late stage Clown World, the two groups roughly correlate with narrative huffers and the new counterculture. Again, a rough generalization - there are plenty of gradients in both. But where the binary distinction does hold up is with the basic orientation towards communication. Core reflex assumptions about what language is and how to use it at whatever level. The problem for analysis is this. [Reality facing vs. narrative huffer] doesn’t correspond to any House of Lies [left/right] variant. But it does correspond with the Functionally Two Species model, or FTS-1 and 2.

The basic split is between a minority capable of observation, information processing, and cumulative learning, and a majority that outsources thought and opinion to screens without any awareness of coherence, context, or the most rudimentary standards of credibility. The Band has written extensively on this for those interested. For this post, it’s sufficient to note the difference in awareness of the existence of external objective reality.

This is a practical observation, not a rigidly literal one. Most narrative huffers believe they live in a material world that isn’t created by their imaginations. They may shoot poison on command, or choose bestest allies that want them dead, but they can tell the door from the wall. Practical in this case means inferred from observed behavior patterns. FTS-1 acts as if external reality is real. Stable, logically causal, consistent, and defined by objectively verifiable truth and falsehood. FTS-2 acts as if external reality is a hallucinatory kaleidoscope of ever-changing claims and stories with no demand for internal consistency or coherence. Personal experience and observation is instantly RAM-dumped in the face of a new screen impulse. Can you believe the media isn’t reporting that great thing Trump did!?!? Whether there’s anything biological involved is unknown. And no one knows what another truly thinks. So to be precise, people who function as if reality is real and people who don’t.

The first group is broad. Many different types accept an objective, consistent external reality. Stay general. I don’t care here if the conception of reality is ontologically correct. It’s the acceptance that there is something objectively, consistently real outside House of Lies narrative.¹ Luckily, that general characteristic is sufficient for this post - no need to get into the weeds.

What matters is accepting the existence of a constant stable reality that our actions take place in. Reality-dwellers come with a built-in check against total descent into solipsistic idiocy. Regardless of the specific ideology they embrace. And that creates a built-in distinction between [subjective things people make up] and [objective things that we have no sway over]. Since we use language to represent both, our communication includes ways to differentiate and clarify. Facts and opinions can both be right or wrong. But the nature of the two is not confusing.

The NPC side doesn’t have this sense of reality. It’s why they flop around when the screens tell them. But when it comes to accepting self-evident lies with zealous faith, there is a significant difference. Call them Cuckservatives and SJWs for convenience.

The SJW and the Cuck both accept basic House of Lies premises. The difference is that the Cuck’s disinterest in anything other than low-wattage “conservative” narrative and consooming - with minimal mental or physical effort. The SJW gravitates to specific, toxic lies, and embraces them like misdirected religion. The Cuck sees the SJW as foolish and lacking sense. The SJW sees the Cuck as a vile, inherently racist, planet-destroying scourge. The Cuck wants the SJW to get real world comeuppance. The SJW want the Cuck to be killed IRL, preferably in a painful and humiliating way.

Neither considers anything outside the terms and narratives of House of Lies screens. The idea that words have to align with objective externals to be meaningful doesn’t exist. Mutagenic toxin can be safe and effective. Neitzsche can be an Overman. The weather is an existential threat and possibly racist. A weird creeper is a secret king. It’s the two poles of the left-right false binary. An imaginary opposition that offers the illusion of substance while ensuring steady entropic social degeneration.

What’s makes this relevant to this post is the attitude towards belief. Because the Cuck doesn’t take specific ideologies seriously - apart from Freedom! and consooming - and can’t think, he assumes everyone is the same. It’s inconceivable that the SJW really wants him dead. It’s just a difference of opinion. The cut and thrust of the marketplace of ideas. And the SJW can’t conceive that the Cuck doesn’t really care about the things he says and isn’t a murderous authoritarian fanatic. Two completely different frames of reference. Carried by the same screens, but with no possibility to engage each other. Ensuring the fake binary never changes, even when the left-right labels do. Which is why the “information age” has been an endless repetition of broken dolls talking past each other.

Now add reality to the mix. In part 2…

1. For example, if mass death in Ukraine is to be stopped at all costs, the same holds morally for other places.