The cognitive order plays a major role in virtually any social system.
When we think of the major components of our social order, we typically think of the economic order, the political order, or the military order, but hardly ever the cognitive order—i.e., the social forces and institutions that determine how we perceive and apprehend the world around us. This is a significant omission.
The cognitive order is a broad and diverse domain, including not just the media, but also everything from colleges to churches. Its impact on the rest of the social order, while always substantial, is growing today.
Effective leaders of groups from coffee klatches to football teams have long known that if you want people to do things, you should go to work on what they perceive. And on the broader stage of world history, what we perceive and believe has led us to war more times than we can count. To give just one example, British World War I propaganda ostensibly showing Germans bayoneting babies helped draw the United States into the conflict, which in turn helped break a stalemate, and ended up permanently tilting the balance of world power.
In a consumer democracy such as ours, the power of the cognitive order is magnified.
Politically, perceptions are what determine which policies we favor and what candidates we vote for; these in turn determine who formulates our laws, and who controls the most concrete forms of physical force, from the military to the police.
Meanwhile in the economic arena, our cognitions and perceptions drive our product choices, which ultimately confer great economic clout—including the wherewithal to finance political campaigns, and thereby exert political and ultimately literal, physical force.
Clearly, if anyone wants to exercise major power in a society like ours, the realm of cognitions is an opportune place to do so. But skill at operating in this arena is at present highly concentrated, mostly in the hands of those who already wield a great deal of clout in other areas like business and politics. The rest of us are not only unable to exercise significant cognitive power, we're not even entirely sure what it is.
If we want to feel less like mere pawns in the larger order of things, we need to correct this state of affairs. A good place to start is with an improved understanding of just what the cognitive order comprises.
(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
