Monday 4 May 2020

Big Lies are usually built on one simple false assumption - which is why no honest-thinking person would be fooled

We live in a Big World ruled by Big Lies.

People feel that they are excused from detecting these lies, because they are supported by a mass of 'official' opinion - yet I think all the Big Lies I have encountered have been erected upon a single false assertion: the falsity of which should have been obvious to anyone who was honest.

Of course, the primary false assumption is hidden by a mass of secondary information - and is seldom obvious. Indeed the sheer volume of secondary information is used to argue in favour of the primary falsehood - yet one Big Lie undercuts any amount of data derived from the assumption the error is true.

For example, the lie (upon which modern leftism is based) is that intelligence is the same in all classes and races, contradicts our personal experience that intelligence differs significantly between people and is significantly inherited from parents.

A related lie that girls and boys/ men and women are innately identical in personality and motivations; therefore inter-changeable in jobs and social roles, is contradicted by experience all the time and everywhere.

Evidence Based Medicine was based on the lie that averages derived from randomised trials of large heterogeneous patient and treatment groups provides precise information on how to treat individual patients. In other words, if you take the average of a measurement done on a crowd of 10,000 people, it can be exactly applied to every individual in that crowd. This is an error of inference.

The Global Warming lie is built on the false assertion that humans can control the earth's climate. This is not an inferential error, but more a matter of total lack of supporting evidence. There is, of course, zero evidence that anybody can control the earth's climate - indeed, the lie is shown by the fact that nobody even tries to check or test this assertion.

(It is also an unsubstantiated lie that the earth's temperature can be predicted, but this is covered by various fabrications claiming that it has been predicted - so maybe it is not-necessarily-dishonest if people believe this one - although it usually is.) 

The birdemic lie is based upon another arbitrary assertion: That the only effective therefore necessary response to a (falsely-asserted) lethal plague is the completely untested hypothesis of national and global lock-down-social-distancing (rather than tried and tested effective methods of the past).

(See Note added, below.)


My point is that these Big Lies are obvious to any honest person who thinks.

The fact that they are so prevalent is because most people are dishonest and don't think.


And the increased prevalance of Big Lies through the twentieth century and still increasing, is that dishonesty and not-thinking are more common and severe in recent generations, in the developed world.

And that is because of mainstream modern metaphysical assumptions. In a world that is officially purposeless, meaningless, and where all lives are necessarily futile - there is neither reason to be honest nor to think.

And so people don't.


Note added: The birdemic response is actually based on two (linked) Big Lies. First is that it is a terrible deadly plague, despite killing such a small % of people. ('They' simply lie, solemnly, that small numbers are actually Big). Second that a global totalitarian coup is the proper and necessary response to a TDP.

Further note: Another topical birdemic Big Lie... Launched today in the UK 'contact tracing' by smartphone for a droplet transmitted viral respiratory disease. Ridiculous! Impossible! Don't make me laugh! It's just the usual thing: a lying excuse for the Establishment's insatiable monomani: permanent, invasive, detailed and extensive population surveillance.   

7 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

If I may risk offending some of our allies, classical theism is also a Big Lie, based on the transparently false assumption that the universe and everyone and everything in it were created from nothing by an omnipotent and benevolent God. Like other Big Lies, it survives because people would rather feel virtuous than think. I tend to pull my punches in this area, but I don't really think I should. A lie is a lie is a lie.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Wm - I'm afraid you are correct.

This must have been very obvious early on, before the waters had been so thoroughly muddied by philosophical abstractions (eg by positing weird stuff about Time, to numb the mind).

And, of course, the lie led to the rise of Islam, that has now outsripped Christianity - which solved the problem by dispensing with the necessity of benevolence.

Jacob Gittes said...

It is truly amazing. I was out in the countryside on the old family homestead settled by our great-grandfather with my son this past weekend. My brother now own's it. He is a difficult sad-sack, to be honest, who places all his identity in his wealth and land, but who seems to sense that something is wrong with his way of being, because although he needles me, he doesn't dare directly attack me.
On Sunday, he asked me directly, "So how would YOU have dealt with the coronavirus?"
I won't go into the boring details of our "discussion" (which was really just him asserted various CNN talking points to anything I said), but one interesting tidbit came out of the conversation that stuck in my mind, and somehow it seems to relate to your post:
My brother claimed that my assertion that I have a strong immune system able to handle this overblown flu means that I was claiming that I am "better" than other people.

So there you have it: those of us who don't believe in a particular Big Lie and simply want to go about our lives with your immune systems as our protection from the Birdemic think we are superior to others. Which sort of ties into how he treats any of my non-belief in the system's lies: he believes that I am asserting some kind of "superiority" or arrogance by thinking for myself.

Thinking for yourself is arrogant. How dare you?!

Bruce Charlton said...

@Jake - We are supposed to be obedient to the consensus of (leftist, atheist, nihilist) Establishment. The epitome of this style of non-thinking is RationalWiki (the most prfect truth inversion machine I've ever seen) - which says things like this sarcastic comment "So the entire medical community is wrong and DrX is right." So why would any doctor ever need to think about what he was saying or doing, when 'The Entire' medical community (itself a whopping lie) has opined?

Sean Fowler said...

@ Bruce and WMT. That was an intriguing exchange. I know little or nothing of the nature of god myself and even less concerning the different schools of thought concerning what his nature might be. Always struggled to see god as omnipotent, imagined that he would have acted differently if he were. But what alternatives are there to the omnipotent and benevolent God who created everything from nothing?That strikes me as standard within Christian thinking.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Sean

"what alternatives are there to the omnipotent and benevolent God who created everything from nothing?"

In two words: Mormon theology. (Wm was raised an active Mormon, and served a mission.)

You could look at my old Mormon theology blog (http://theoreticalmormon.blogspot.com/)

Plus, if you word search 'omnipotence' or 'omni' on this blog, you will find several posts on the subject.

Sean Fowler said...

@ Bruce . thank you. Ties into my recent thoughts quite nicely. Became familiar with and have been thinking a lot about Daniel 10 recently. Where an angel has to fight a bunch of demons in order to answer a prayer and then has to fight a load more on the way home. Seems like there’s quite a battle going on. Maybe it ties into my recent comment wondering why god wasn’t doing more. Made me think that he’s not necessarily having things entirely his own way. could probably use all the help he can get. I suppose the thing with omnipotence is that you can only do what is actually possible And also what is right.
I’ll definitely punch in Omni.