Sein und Shine, interpreation creates reality instead of the other way around

From: Amadae Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy

'(...)the Cold War struggle was not so much one of enemy pitted against enemy in a ferocious to-the-death struggle as it was a fight over which interpretation of Cold War events would prevail and would serve as the foundation for determing action. Here the drama is recast such that, rather than seeing the United States as a unified actor on a bipolar world stage, it is an internal US struggle among interested parties vying to gain control over defining the Cold War. Those whose interpreation of events were accepted had the power to direct policy. Thus, ironically, the actual Cold War drama lay in the manufacture of the Cold War itself, as policymakers sougt to convince the American nation of its peril and to orchestrate policy reforms in order to stave off the perceived threat.'

Note: the Cold War history provides excellent material for demonstrating the power of imagination and deception to create reality. Reality is manufactured. Reality is not a given. Of course, the policmakers depict threats as real and given, objectively there and explains their policies as a strategy that disarms the threat of its reaility. Amadae shows the amazing history of how American Cold War policy was based on and legitimized on the missile gap with the Soviet Union. This gap never existed! The proof for that was available to policymakers. To make things more complicated: policymakers deny that they lied (which seems the only possible conclusion). Luminaries like Rumsfeld and the Harvard historian (i forgot his name) repeat this line of reasoning in the seventies: although there is no proof that there is a missile gap, that does not mean that the Soviets have less weapons. The Soviets are namely perfectely capable of deceiving us. They probably fabricated weapons that are invisible for our intelligence agencies. The argument of the invisible weapon worked perfect in the Iraqi war as well. The same is true for the threat of invisble terrorist that, because they are invisble, can be everywhere anywhere anytime. The invisible is real.
Note: Part two of the Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis shows us the Rumsfeld epoche in Cold War history. Team B, or how paranoia defines reality. The difficulty is always to determine whether these people are really lying or that they really believe in the reality of their vision. This is the big question in the debat between Reality and Schijn/Schein (what sthe Englsih equivalent to this). Of course the problem of lying and truth is central to the first dialogues of Plato.


Reality must be manufactured.