The insult to humanity; Trump; the dictator of United States, is famous for doing so much crime that it overwhelms their justice system (if they have any in the first place…). And so before they get to even start their investigations (which they hardly ever do); the crime ring of Trump is already done with their business. But that only explains the case of one president while there are many other dictatorships all around the world including here in Iran with the evil evil evil regime of the Islamic “Republic” (or whatever that it means) and in all of these cases; a Graph Convey problem makes sure their satanic deeds became the reality. What that maybe? It is sad but important to be examined.

There is a huge form of “Graph Convey” that must be regarded as “Cultural Graph” or “Group Graph” or even the “Macro Graph”. In this system you have a two-level graph:

What mass media does; through the “Manufacturing Consent” is creating a place where people all get the “same”; “refined”; “simple”; and already digested information. And so; it can be seen as a very strong connection in the Cultural Graph:

And so when governments or billionaires program all people; they basically shape this huge graph. A graph that can be seen at one end of the ““Threshold of the Reverse Viewpoint””. Once you are here; to liberate yourself you must at least collect enough information so you reach the threshold, and then off you go to the liberation:

Now; this is one hard hard hard process. You must put years learning; thinking and challenging your views. We are talking about many many nodes in a graph not just a simple thing or two. George Orwell shows this amazingly well in the seminal “Animal Farm”. You see how at first the image of the Animal democracy is presented and everyone is united in it (the point of arriving at enough shared nodes to form a “Cultural Graph”) and then the pigs start to; one by one and slowly changing the nodes of the graph; the famous “All animals are equal; but some animals are more equal than others”. (what a quote…). This is the phase in which dictators do two things in parallel: (A) They uphold and actively talk and promote the “Cultural Graph Inside People’s Brains”. and (B) actively edit the real manifestations of the graph so that no one realizes.

By doing this people do things against their own benefits because they have this engraved source of truth, locally, in their own brains. And so given the fact that dismantling this giant graph takes time, and that the trust to replace it with something else is hard; and potentially expensive; then they just accept the incident as a “bug” a “crash in the system”; a “glitch to be forgotten”. Just as the animals did in the farm and became blind to the fact that pigs were getting just too much power.

Standing in a fairly strange place in Iran; I see the mullahs and the people of the regime who we call “Arzeshies” (arzesh = value; arzeshi means those who value islam; it is a quite offensive word we recently invented) they denied and ignored when their army deliberately shot down a Ukrainian plane and killed over 250 innocent civilians. People protested and got killed; that day literally became a cultural funeral day people get sad about each year. And then this month the United States shot three rockets into a children school at Minab and killed over 140 innocent children. This time those who killed the people at the Ukrainian flight got angry, those who were angry denied and ignored. Both of these catastrophes involved 100% innocent civilians. In talking to both sides you would see they just could not leave their graphs and turn against it. They had to ignore and sacrifice in a way.

So then; naturally we must ask: “But how can you change the mind of people who have become this involved and trusting their leaderships to the point of blindness?”

Bonhoeffer, in the now famous “Theory of Stupidity” explains it so beautifully: “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless, Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”

and he continues “If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defeat but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.” This portion of it is the heart of gold. Basically the man understood that stupidity is not intellectual, and then he even continues to write: “The impression one gains is so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.”

I get sad thinking what a great chat we could have if he was alive and I could show my “Mind Graph” theory to him; he was so close yet lacked this portion of the picture. And sadly essentially all that he says is the problem of Graph Convey and point of view.

Imagine you wish to “convert” a person at the other end of the viewpoint; to your graph. You must slowly and with much patience; talk to them. Convert nodes one by one and practice weights over and over. Only to convert one person and over a long period of time.

Together with Zea we talk about things a lot (hours a day) and try to shape a common graph. It did not start with this theory—if anything; this theory was born with the help of these talks—but with my experience of therapy and Zea’s very strong belief that all problems get fixed with Talking. Not only we experienced transition between too many different graphs and ways of living, but we converted too many different people (BTW; I now notice why I care about the idea of Hans-Georg Moeller’s fluidity of identity, because these are navigable graphs; I must write about them in length) this is of course if you wish to really make someone think and reflect. The way mass media plan ignorance and stupidity—as Bonhoeffer calls it—is through simplicity.

I JUST REALIZED I HAVE UNDERSTOOD SOMETHING NEW

What this simplicity is and what does it mean? The company Apple has for a very long time been a true brand maker and identity shaper. That is why I loved them so much when I was a kid. I loved how they shaped every single aspect of their reality with much care to be according to their definition of the world. Now once Jobs died and the era of Tim Cook began new things started to show up in their actions. and while as a kid I saw this as branding, now it makes sense to me as a huge “Propaganda” program. My idea was then confirmed when the company started Apple TV+ and produced shows like “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking” that both seemed to very deliberately convey a new way of life to the audience. Now I’m getting ahead of myself (sorry); what I wanted to say was regarding the way Apple puts their ideas in the world. In a panel interview somewhere; a student asks Cook on how he can do the same marketing that Apple does? And in something that shocked me as Apple never explains anything; he said that we make very simple short messages that are very clear; we never say iPhone has two thousand things in it; we only say “Do you know you can take these pictures with your iPhone?”. So the way they do it is gradual prolonged exposure to nodes in a graph. Node by node; one by one. But these nodes are features and those features don’t have that much dependency to each other. One cannot teach Physics or Chemistry like this.

Yet complex matters are “graph” problems. Dependencies and their weights emerge. Once they are there we begin to have problems and see that the Apple way just does not work. And then we come to the problem of Political Propaganda. They do not construct the graph too. Maestro Postman was a genius and he had noticed the way telegraphic media made the context obsolete; he then argued that today people have so many facts without having any use for them. He had this theory that the only use of the useless information we take from the media; is to pass it onto others in the parties so they get confused on not knowing what to do with them.

And that is propaganda. Information; repeated; without use; unconnected. If you go to see the Iranian media; you’ll see they play exactly the same game as Apple. and the the same goes for other media in the world. Another hero of mine, Maestro Klein had identified the depressive and “paranoid-schizoid” positions in which the former was this complicated state and the latter; a very simplified and separate mode of seeing the reality (the breast stories; and movies like James Bond with a defined villain who is 100% evil; and the saint of the hero whose all problems—killing police, destroying property, — are all ignored because they are good in the eye of the story). What if that is somehow connected to this as well? I’m sure it has to be.

Here I just had a realization and could not let it go. Sorry. And back to the main thing:

And so the propaganda of Apple and Iranian news outlets are following the same rule book Apple does. The influence of that company is huge in Iran. but I’m both sure that (A) They didn’t reveal it till very recently, (B) The people at Iran’s agencies do not have enough mental faculties to deduce their ways; and (D) Their techniques precede Apple’s by so many years. Therefore this is either a very organic or an old rule in the playbook of Propaganda. Regardless of any of this; The ways they do this is very much alike. Iran has only a few outlets and they always tell the exact same news. They even have the same short simple messages and articles just as the other outlets have.

You keep seeing the same article everywhere. They say Apple has this 700+ pages book that exactly defines how each and every of its terms has to be used and said. Things like “don’t use the word ‘pushed’; use the word ‘tapped’”, which really is amazing. At one side it gives the ultimate touch to the branding as it gets a language as coherent as a real person. But then it also removes all the nuance and keeps their messages as atomic and repetitive as possible and so that gives you the propaganda structure:

Media gives you processed information that is already digested for you. You don’t need to process it anymore; there is no place for reflection. It is already “Right” and “Correct”. It is a fact. And this deprives you the chance to examine it, fact check it; measure its correctness; find its peer reviews. It is like a virus to your Mind Graph. It gets injected to it. And since there is no edges and weights required. It stays there.

In the “Transactional Analysis” of Eric Berne looked at memory in three separate ways:

The interesting part of the idea is that while the Adult memory is “processed”, the parent memory is not. It is data you accepted without thinking about them. While his ideas have no scientific backing — rather than they are even against it; the resemblance is stark. And well there must be this virus of processed information nodes that people take without integration to their graph nodes. After all thinking is hard and people love to accept things without a second of thinking.

P.S. Thanks for reading this, I think I have had so many change of heart and direction writing this that it never ended up in a fixed message, but then so many ideas emerged that I just had to explore. After all, this is a lab note!