> The people lying about their daughter getting pregnant were the same that ostracized their neighbor's daughter when she was the pregnant one.
(Their neighbor should have lied too.)
I tend to view societies as non-linear and catastrophic systems. The system above was trying to maintain a social order and it wasn't attempting a 100% conformity to rule x. There is a threshold of violating rule x that would destabilize the social order and the governing social rules are optimized to keep violations well below that threshold. By lying about a violation event, both the fact of the violation is leaked (because the lies are transparent), and, a family unit is protected from suffering the consequences of publicly breaking rule x. But if a family of daughters repeatedly had presented daughters with cases of 'eating disorder', then you can be certain that family would be subject to social scrutiny.
Every culture develops a variant of this mechanism. For some it is a first class device (e.g. Ta'arof in Iranian culture) and for others it is an implicit device.
The key issue is always "where is that threshold" and not that these mechanisms exist. They exist for a reason, since as every school child knows:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
[p.s. to be clear, imo, the contemporary lies we're discussing have crossed those thresholds and are destabilizing and we can possibly trace the seminal event to Watergate and Deepthroat and acceptance of anonymous sources.
Here is a very interesting example of a key leader discussing transparency in the press. It is interesting in the sense that it both addresses this issue and is itself the source of a fairly prevalent disinformation.
(Their neighbor should have lied too.)
I tend to view societies as non-linear and catastrophic systems. The system above was trying to maintain a social order and it wasn't attempting a 100% conformity to rule x. There is a threshold of violating rule x that would destabilize the social order and the governing social rules are optimized to keep violations well below that threshold. By lying about a violation event, both the fact of the violation is leaked (because the lies are transparent), and, a family unit is protected from suffering the consequences of publicly breaking rule x. But if a family of daughters repeatedly had presented daughters with cases of 'eating disorder', then you can be certain that family would be subject to social scrutiny.
Every culture develops a variant of this mechanism. For some it is a first class device (e.g. Ta'arof in Iranian culture) and for others it is an implicit device.
The key issue is always "where is that threshold" and not that these mechanisms exist. They exist for a reason, since as every school child knows:
[p.s. to be clear, imo, the contemporary lies we're discussing have crossed those thresholds and are destabilizing and we can possibly trace the seminal event to Watergate and Deepthroat and acceptance of anonymous sources.Here is a very interesting example of a key leader discussing transparency in the press. It is interesting in the sense that it both addresses this issue and is itself the source of a fairly prevalent disinformation.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speech...
(The disinfo bit is where an edited version of above audio is promoted as Kennedy warning us about the NWO and Illuminati. /G)]