The topic of Authorization (the schemas we use to authorize language, beliefs, ideas, decisions and activities) is something that has long fascinated me. In a discussion this morning, I suddenly recognized that there’s a specific kind of attack that compromises the foundation of internal authorization schemas by placing a deceptively ‘simple’ trap at the foundational level of the entire system. This trap could be as simple as ‘The Bible IS the Word of God’ or ‘It’s Unpatriotic to Question the President’.

This topic is worthy of careful study; understanding it could provide us with the means to acquire immunity to this species of cognitive compromise.

Part of the reason these gambits succeed is that they offload a vast array of otherwise necessary decision-making processes onto a single root-level construct that effectively branch-sifts anything that might otherwise require careful consideration, research, and decision-making.

The resulting ‘convenience’, while actually and actively toxic, is nonetheless comforting… until a situation arises where it gets you isolated, injured, or killed… at which point the underlying fiction will be either too well-entrenched or will have become an ‘identity element’ (something someone has confused with themselves) and thus be either impossible to remove or extremely resistant to extraction.