Perhaps. I only see it as a "subset" in the sense of: many things have to go right for good communication to happen -- ethos being one of them.
But its still "upstream" from communication. Philosophy informs action.
Your original point is that our leaders need to get better at communicating nuanced issues. That's a non-starter if the people in charge see nuance as an obstacle and straight up adopt an anti-nuance attitude.
My point is, they're bad at communicating nuance in the way that a bulldozer is bad at building a house. It just wasn't their mission. And that didn't become obvious until after these emails were leaked.
In history, every time you set up an institution it becomes an entity in its own right. Company’s, orgs, religions, federal entities and countries all vie for power at their own level and within their own space. The problem with an ‘information-control/censorship/verification’ is… it’s exactly that, the age old ‘we are controlling information for the common good’. Every major nation in history eventually evolves to this point. They claim that the internet made this a new thing.
Listen to Lux Friedman - episode 254 with jay who professor the medical department at Stanford. It’s entitled the case against lockdowns.
‘ Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.’
-Bertrand Russell
Edit: lol, little disinformation quip of my own. He’s just a professor, doesn’t head the department after a quick google search.
I've seen that episode but not made that connection, very interesting.
However, the way the quote ends paints a slightly different picture:
`The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determine.`
Well - all the evidence presented in that episode would be exactly the type of information the royal society (and every other federal entity in the world) seems to be wanting to supress. Alot of the information presented is very 'anti-mask', 'anti-lockdown', 'anti-vaccine'. He makes many points that we have devolved into some kind of mass histeria when it comes to covid.
Also, the reason i left the rest of the quote out is it takes away from his argument because despite the fact of him writing an entire treaty on revolutionary thought, he didn't seem to study most of the 'Revolutions' that occured from those thoughts. You can replace 'The doctrine of __x' with anything in the sentence and it would have range true historically. when the Tzar of russia decided that liberalism was needed in the late 1800's, the more people he freed the more those people who were freed swung further and further left until everyone was screaming some kind of collecive anarchism forwarded by bakunin and the Tzar was assassinated.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but feel compelled to point out that I think the virus origin is only a minor footnote in the communication failures. The topics of lockdowns and vaccination weigh much more heavily in my mind and I think have much greater relevancy for most people. Here the goal of informed consent was largely discarded in favor of manufactured consent. I would love to see the CDC or some authority have a transparent and reputable weighing of the tradeoffs involved.
