"Air" of the Devil, Prince of the Air; worldviews and disinformation (false witness)

Look at this quote from 1672:

But beside the infirmities of humane Nature, the seed of Error within our selves, and the several ways of delusion from each other, there is an invisible Agent, and secret promoter without us, whose activity is undiscerned, and plays in the dark upon us; and that is the first contriver of Error, and professed opposer of Truth, the Devil. - Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica

http://www.puritanboard.com/f36/unwish-their-own-being-86434/#post1074356


"...secret promoter without us" ... "...whose activity is undiscerned"...and "plays in the dark upon us"...

I.e. influence that we can't see, but that has effect on us. This is why I'm singling like worldview analysis (that David Naugle book, Worldview: The History of a Concept; and the Nancy Pearcey book, Finding Truth), as-well-as disinformation, the biblical term for which is false witness (Diana West's American Betrayal and any number of other books on Soviet disinformation).

Too see how powerful disinformation is here are two examples: 1. in the middle of the 20th century America liberated western Europe from tyranny AND helped rebuild entire national economies after that. The Soviet Union had to make western Europeans hate America. The *creed* of disinformation is tell a lie enough times and it becomes the truth. After a fairly short amount of time and a lot of disinformation western Europeans began to see America as the embodiment of evil. Think about that. That is how powerful disinformation is. The liberators and rebuilders of their nations became the representative of evil in their minds. (Disinformation, by the way, is not just telling lies, it is getting foreign nations to tell the lies *through* their own news an cultural institutions. It's much, much more powerful. When one country merely tells lies about another is is called *misinformation.* Disinformation is very different.)

Example #2 is: imagine you are about to enter a room full of people you don't know and you will try to present yourself well. Now imagine if somebody got to the room first and said, "This person who is about to arrive here killed his neighbor's child when he was in his twenties and served six years in prison for it. Don't say anything, but I'm just letting you know. He strangled the child in a storage shed." So now you enter the room, completely unaware of the false witness that has been spread throughout the room (the 'air). Note how this false witness will be invisible to you, yet will influence you greatly. Effect you negatively. That is disinformation. That is also worldview, when you are unaware of your worldview. Or the worldview you've unconsciously picked up from your environment and culture and what not.

We have to see all the things that are invisible to us and that influence us. The Work illuminates, by giving us a new language, to see things within ourselves that were unseen by us previously. All the features of False Personality. This is the same thing.

This is a pretty good triad of things like this: worldviews, disinformation, and false-personality.