Disrespect, Self-Deception, and Knowledge

The general issue to be discussed is whether media can shape interaction, especially within systems of cognition. The particular medium that will be examined in this respect is power. The specific question to be addressed is: Why do people tend to believe that they know purely objective things, and that the world in which they live consists of things – and people – whose natures are more or less unchanging, even if individual things themselves are not? The focus will be upon whether and how the exercise of power can potentiate the process of interaction such that particular types of interaction tend to occur rather than others. It will be argued that the addition of such potential to interaction can lead to specific types of meaning being constituted in interaction that may facilitate the functioning and propagation of a seemingly alien power over us.

People believe they know objective things with stable natures because they have forgotten that they live in a world of meaning that they have created themselves – and it is the state of existing social relations that causes them to forget this fact. When human relations and human creativity become ossified into products of human activity that appear to exist independently of their creators, people do not attain the awareness that all we perceive and know is transitory precisely because we have created it as it exists for us. Heidegger has written about the forgetfulness of being. We are instead concerned with a type of imposed forgetfulness that has led us to misunderstand our own creative and productive powers as the objective power of an external and seemingly eternal world that is beyond our control.