The rise and fall of communication (civilization).

Imagine a typical group of teenagers hanging out on a street corner, or a ball field, or a shopping mall, and a friend of theirs approached from having been somewhere else all day. In the happiness of seeing their friend, they surround him, playfully push him around a bit, and ask him where he’s been. He quickly tells them and they all share the details of their day in return. Typically, almost all of their quick conversation was done with song lyrics and movie quotes. With far fewer words than any adult would expect possible, they shared all the information needed to let each other know exactly what happened that day.

It takes an expert writer a great deal of practice and work to use pages of well chosen words to build new and unique scenes in the minds of readers. Then, when a group of people have all read the same story, they need only a few words to reference those entire scenes to communicate their own ideas and intentions.
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Consider the British aristocracy and their eternal desire to expand territory and acquire wealth as a theoretical example. Prior to the works of Shakespeare they did not have the imagery or storylines to express their modern intentions effectively. The Bible is a story for simple agrarian feudal aspirations. Within the works of Shakespeare, there are scenes and vignettes that allowed the aristocracy to efficiently and effectively share their own intentions and desires like never before.

To be clear, Shakespeare did not write stories that encouraged or enabled British colonialism, he only wrote stories that had modern imagery and concepts that could be used by the aristocracy to better express their own intentions. No different than how teenagers can reference a scene in a movie to express something the writer and director could never have imagined.

As the generations passed, and the biased interpretation of Shakespeare became entrenched in the culture of the aristocracy, the ability to share their personal desires using those scenes and images also became more efficient. But, all things must come to an end.

When the writing on the wall began to become clear and the empire began to strain under its own weight, the aristocracy was certain that the problem was in the fact that people had not read Shakespeare properly. So they forced their subjects to read Shakespeare. And when it became apparent that no one else was interpreting Shakespeare according to the intentions of the aristocracy, the way Shakespeare was taught became distorted in order to achieve a specific outcome. Textbook propaganda.
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A painter constructs images with color, a sculptor with stone, a novelist with words in structures of stories, and a philosopher with words in structures of logic. All are trying to build new images that people can then use to communicate more effectively and efficiently.

Like images and scenes of a story, structured theories allow people to use a few words to share a complex idea. They too go through this cycle of distortion and propaganda. Even economic theories… capitalism and socialism; which are the stories that followed the Shakespeare variation. Most people will only reference pieces of theories, often highly distorted, to support their own desires and intentions.

Intentions are always more potent than logic, theories, and stories. Anyone with a passion will distort everything to their own intent.
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I have been studying up on AI recently, and it occurred to me that AI is a powerful tool that can be used by anyone to create justifications for their own intent and desire. It is a modern crystal ball.