Top Highlights

• and cause and effect goes by undetected when it is presented in narrative form. To manipulate the mind, recruitment narratives are usually described in linear/unified/sequential fashion with an idealized utopian beginning, a conflicted middle (current) situation that encourages the audience to situate themselves (identify) with the good guys as vic...
• consistent with the projected future.  This is done by: alternately including and excluding information, assigning moral responsibility to various actors and even non-actors, implying cause and effect where there may be none.
• our circumstances.   People who have been victimized are particularly vulnerable to manipulative narratives that can encourage them to justify violence as retaliatory action. People who have not been victimized are harder targets but the process is the same. It begins by ascribing victim status to the target audience.
• question is: how do ideologically driven world views get accorded truth status, thereby appearing to be natural rather than constructed, neutral rather than motivated, and obvious rather than questionable?
• The “war on “terror” metaphor relies on an unvoiced assumption that the narrative begins with this current victimization, as the narrative structure implemented to make the claim is linear rather than cyclical. But in the mind of the “other” this event was not the beginning, and if everyone jumps on the