Essay 4: Illusory Nature of Message Structures

Essay 4

Illusory Nature of Message Structures

In the last essay on Membership and Origins I exposed a mechanism for membership recruitment, which has an attractive force, together with membership retention, which has a holding force. These complimentary mechanisms conduct their function through messaging. Additionally, external messaging can come by various sense organs. But let’s focus on visual and auditory stimuli that is transmitted through common media. Internal messaging comes in the form of spontaneous thought, memory, even one’s internal voice and mental screen, which we can only guess at or canvas.

I also mentioned that a message structure can show a ‘philosophical’ or monetary divergence from the invariant theme of the group. In certain cases, the apparent goal of one of the dual messages is partitioned severely, not to better serve the interests established in the recruiting message, but to divert the expected distribution of energy generated by the group.

Grouping is natural

Coalescing activities are ubiquitous. We accepted that power accrues with proximity in groups, which seems to be the inherent organizing principle of organisms, symbiotes, social animals, … people. I also recognize that groups are associated with some kind of container where retaining principles are offered, or arise out of group activities, that supply symbolic furniture on which to rest. This is the beginning of a ‘lokah’ or constellation, where the space between the group’s collected messages is imbued with connective tissue by mere association –not logic.

Our present interest here concerns an debilitating form of grouping. Any influence that defines a group but incorporates other agenda beyond the advertised portion serving the interest of the target group, either directly or indirectly.  One of the most interesting is the cult which features a schedule of priority reorganization and memory replacement.

How does priority reordering work? Priority reorganization is relatively easy to accomplish if a new order is demonstrated to remedy or further the group concern, the group invariant. Another way is to apply focal avoidance stimuli as stated in last essay.

The invariant or brand is ostensibly related to the central function of the group and becomes a hitching post for the group, and to each member of the group. It is essentially a port thru which additions of information pass. The old priority is not destroyed. All the critical elements of the members life are still there, they’ve just been rearranged through the ‘requirements’ of the group. The more incremental the better, but some groups have functions that demand drastic reordering of the members’ priorities, and rely on the significant weight of the invariant in the mind of the member.   

How does memory replacement work, at a distance, without dramatic effects in a secluded lab?

Memories are replaced by out-numbering them not erasing them. Erasure happens when we forget due to crowding out. Like priority reordering, replacement or erasure are not absolute, nothing is destroyed. These methods rely on constant screening and diversion, not eradication of memories. There are memories that are indelible, though. These will play a new role if influencers and ad agencies can figure out what they are. Most typical center around family, money, sex and these serve as anchorages for nearly all other concerns.

But to get an idea of what I’m talking about, ask yourself how many memories can you recall currently that are from media, and how many from personal attendance, ‘real time’? Once you answer this, ask: How many current memories are of people who know you, how many are phone or media personalities?

Answers to this rest on a spectrum, weighing fewer or more ‘real time’ people or influences in life. These results change over time depending on how busy one is with physical reality. It is significant when we realize that media influencers and associated memories are hugely multiple, messaging millions of people at once while they are equally impersonal.

We think we understand that a participatory medium creates a group where expectation seems to promise the same leverage that ‘real time’ groups acquire through proximity of people. But since we are staring at a screen that supports copy and effigy, it is bereft of the dimension where leverage is to be found. Instead, the cohesive community energy produced in the experience of the message, reverts back to the sender in the form of revenue and not to the greater power of the community targeted by the medium. By this activity the power of proximity is stripped & sold to advertisers. This is information capitalism.

In the case of two-way media technology, this one-way broadcast situation is not present but does present a situation where conference members can be relegated by various electronic means that amplify those that would be present in person, such as ‘muting’ or stone walling. In the field though most people engage with broadcast media that is not participatory but for entertainment or information that may or may not function in the interest of the group of viewers.

Given all these properties that are available, meant to retain membership and the varied ends for which created energy is spent, there is always a danger in a diverging message structure that these means do not operate properly or tacitly, but instead become a disconcerting part of awareness. Sometimes, organizational inattention to messaging leaves a static presence belying the management character of the group. Demands made of the group may become cumbersome.

More likely, a context-change in the world or lives of members reveal the message structure for what it is, a structure. This is the Orphic Turn that brings a syndrome of reversals for the group and member. When it becomes apparent that some of its elements no longer fit and it springs out of the managerial background of the group, the member decenters from group’s design perspective and view it from 360 degrees. Through the subsequent enhancement, awareness of the message structure as a body has the effect of making the message content deponent or illusory, even if the individual messages are free of falsehood.

When this happens spontaneously in members, then the reordering and replacing functions that were tooled to capture members in the beginning, will function to remove members in the waning life of the group.

We can better measure such progress with these parameters of group cohesion: Energy, Utility, Redistribution.

Energy is that surfeit gained in the coalescence of the group, tangible and intangible.

Utility is the cost-benefit group formation. The wide assumption is that there will be greatest benefit for least cost. This Epicurean vision is lubricant for group coalescence. This optimism is extant in the world-view of prospective members. But the reality of organizations that diverge, shows that the opposite is the case where costs increase with declining benefit.

Redistribution characterizes the benefit which the group realizes that is distributed to the group which edifies its members.

These categories are fuzzy such that they include intangible values with tangible, but these are still measurable in focus inquiry. They address the structural side of the group.

A less predictable or discoverable set of concerns reside within the member’s perceptions that actually invigorates the group: Belief intensity, Consequential behavior, perceived Access.

Belief intensity is the emotional load of the group within the member.

Consequential behavior is that behavior which the member feels is appropriate to the group function.

Access, or perceived access characterizes the level of success of the member within the group. This can mean access to the promised distributions from the group or access to host and shepherding members.

These two sets of parameters measure the functionality and general health of a group.

Vulnerability

Group cohesion depends on the credibility members have in it. Anything that renders credibility as illusory is harmful to the group along the parameters listed above. Those groups, for instance, who engage in nefarious aims in a divergent play with membership set the stage for future apocalypse. Major vulnerabilities exist beyond the ever-changing conditions of the world:

Projection: It is the double-edged sword of behavior, whether or not it is conscious. It is the inescapable mechanics of action as an independent existent, in that actions carry meaning more than words. Projection is a linear concept of a circular motion wherein one action has a reaction and travels back.

One problem with this baked-in situation is irresolvable, that is limited knowledge. This means we will always be acting somewhat askew to completely informed perceptions, but we can come very close due to the faculty of memory. However, this situation generates a constant stream of discontinuities that disturb our sense of balance.

Another difficulty is standardization of messaging that goes awry of changing membership. The program may have served in the beginning but the standard message is now not aligned with the members. This is quite serious, so messaging requires immediate modification. The vulnerability is more drastic if the messaging has been honestly representing its function to the group, but the group has mutated from the invariant idea.

Standardization of message can also infer a standardization of members within a reprioritization-memory replacement regime. This is the authoritarian message and agendum throughout history where groups coalesce to serve a tyrant. But as in the movie Metropolis, the eventual reality of such limiting regimes is a living death of a zombie.

Another sign of group withering is assimilation or acclimation to the groups messaging & experience. Here, the techniques of the group with its remedies are assimilated into the members, individually, making the group to be an extraneous obligation. A related change in membership is acclimation to threats which the group aims to remedy.

Empedoclean Cycle

One thing we cannot change is change per se. We can only hope to modify it through choices we make constantly. This means that all compound entities such as groups and the members of groups will experience external and internal changes.

The group, with its aperture on the world, its advantages and promises of betterment will undergo mutation itself. This is due to the innumerable, therefore uncontrollable variables that quietly attach to the group and members. It must continually modify and improve messaging & benefit in order to persist.

Dialectic treats this in an orderly fashion, realizing before any hypothesis rears up, that it will, as a thesis, meet a challenge, a difference, an antithesis. This can bring about a crisis where the group changes, diversifies or erodes. Such a process brings division, apostasy, separation leaving a partitioned membership. Sometimes the group benefit outweighs the grievances arising in the group: An aggrieved faction does not leave the group but remains for various reasons. But this is not a happy situation for the group or its invariant code, when distributions are inadequate or unfair.

Next time—Examples from history.

Thomas Reedy ©2025