Ever wonder why, when you try to apply good old fashion logic to big questions, you get stuck in a quagmire of mumbo jumbo until your head hurts? Until you most likely shrug it all off and move on? Even while most people recognize that something is wrong in the terrain? The terrain we all rely on for life sustenance.
Often, for many, the next step is not just to forget and move on. For many have to face actual consequences of cognitive overload that often manifests in a lack of good food, shelter, water and social relationships.
Well, interestingly, I came upon a word that I had not come across before. Perhaps you know it.
Agnotological
That’s the word.
Claude AI gave me this definition:
“Agnotology — The Manufactured Architecture of Not-Knowing
Within the sociology of knowledge, agnotology is the study of deliberate, culturally cultivated ignorance or doubt. Ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Active agents of culturally cultivated ignorance include mass media, corporations, and government agencies, operating through secrecy and suppression of information, document destruction, and selective memory. Wikipedia
Proctor’s crucial distinction, noted in the anthology text, is between ignorance as absence and ignorance as manufactured product. Scientific secrecy long predates peer review.
This is the epistemological foundation of the suppression order [my enquiry was about]. It is not merely a political act. It is an act of knowledge engineering — the deliberate installation of structured ignorance across time. Sources: Proctor, R.N. & Schiebinger, L. (eds.) (2008). Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press; Proctor, R.N. (1995). Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer. Basic Books.”
Further along in this particular research I recognized a few examples of Agnotology.
We were discussing the legal architecture of the Church, and several key events in legal, or Canonical, Church history, and how it affects us in our Terrain today. You’ll have to read the whole research paper to discover more about that, and I hope you do. But for now I want to share another surprising find.
Did you know that cum is Latin for “with”, “since”, “whereas” or “when”? And cum appears in vast numbers of serious Latin texts including papal bulls, conciliar documents, Roman law, and scholastic philosophy? In fact, according to Claude, it is the most common Latin preposition! But when I searched for a very important Church doctrine, the cum nuper, you can imagine what google brought up. This is one example of Agnotology at work. It isn’t so much that cum nuper has been hidden from scholastic enquiry through censorship. Or the many other Church documents starting with cum. But information that is obscured, in this case by things excedingly different to what we may be researching (and you can imagine what that was in this instance), side track us from our cognitive flow. Sometimes so abruptly, as in this instance, that our focus is derailed.
And when Agnotology becomes an act of knowledge engineering then many more threads of cognitive flow can become distorted, halted, interrupted, and actually lead you to your conclusion that it is all too much for your head to pursue this, so you must not have any power to do so! And if you have read my essay on Nudging then you will know that the justification for nudging has been documented as completely okay because men and women are not cognitively capable of coming up with the right choices themselves, through proper discernment of proper accessible variables.
So when you watch this short video, consider Agnotology when you consider how each individual within the whole paradigm, you and I included, operates within a knowledge base of ‘that’s how it is’, which is largely constructed through a lot more than we think we have access to.
Another example of the use of Agnotology is arguably the acquisition of sovereign adjacent critical infrastructure – the primary international airport, two major ports and the main freight rail operator by the world’s largest asset manager, Blackrock. The fact that this happened without any public referendum, without any formal mechanism for the people on the land (of Australia – specifically Brisbane and Sydney), to consent or refuse, and was covered, when it was covered at all, as a routine capital markets transaction, is precisely what we call Agnotology. The facts are not hidden. They are simply aligned with the production of ignorance of the masses, steering minds away from arguments of Constitutional Law towards acceptance of Corporate systems.
Enjoy the video. This was created when I dropped my research with Claude AI into Notebook LLM.
You may find it strange that I have put this up on my counselling confidence website. However, the full investigation that led me to this term was for a better comprehension of how institutional child abuse endures across generations despite several major studies and failed warriors.
Agnotological architecture is not just political. Many individuals cognitively overwhelmed, or who have experienced extreme cognitive dissonance without resolution, suffer greatly. Comprehending Stress and our relationship with it; and the Terrain and our place in it, allows us to energetically embrace our Life force in ways I don’t think we’ve even imagined just yet.
You are more amazing than you think. I promise.
Enjoy the short video.
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