In this weirdly inverted world, most people spend several hours per day "informing" themselves about what it going on in the world by means of the mass and social media, supplemented by face-to-face gossip... mostly about the agenda established by mass/ social media.
But people neither remember not think about this stuff. They do not even try to make connections, to draw inferences - to make the effort to remember whether their sources proved to be honest and reliable. They don't even try to check whether what is being said makes sense!
In a profound way, people do not trust themselves to understand the world; and therefore open their minds wide to... well, to whatever the world is currently deciding to pour-into their heads.
This self-mistrust is reinforced by several decades worth of widely disseminated propaganda that there is no free will, that we live in a simulation (or Matrix).
...And that we are fed a diet of lies by those who desire only to exploit us.
In other words; we are supposed to believe the self-confessed liars who desire to exploit us are telling the truth, when they tell us that they are liars who desire to exploit us!
Clearly, this "Cretan Liar" strategy - telling people not to trust themselves and of liars repeatedly telling you they are lying - has mind-warping consequences if not transcended.
It is a PSYOPS; the consequences of which are a kind of numbed passivity; motivation becoming little more than moment-by-moment "coping".
This experience, which we all share, can be regarded as a colossal life-lesson; from which we can and should learn that we ourselves are ultimately the only trust-worthy source. And it then becomes our task to understand how this can be.
Thus, to avoid chronic despair; we are forced, eventually, into recognizing that we must assume that our personal judgment is the only possible basis of any kind of knowledge - and then to develop an understanding which explains how this situation arose.
How do we find ourselves in a world where we simply must derive our ultimate beliefs by some kind of intuitive act; and how can we expect that this will potentially lead to reality - to true knowledge...
What are the pre-requisites for such a system of knowing? How can it operate?
These are questions to which we need to find answers in order to function - yet the externally-provided sources are all telling us (repeatedly) that they cannot provide such answers.
Such questions seem to me to lead to a very different set of assumptions that those we started-out with, or which are available from the literature. So very different that Men of the past would regard it as crazy - after all, how can one person overturn, or rather transcend, the wisdom of ages...
Well, it might seem like crazy if it was not for the extreme and unrelenting craziness of the mainstream, of The Normal, of the way that most people think, talk and behave for most of the time - of the incoherences that they assert; and of the psychological consequences of this situation of endemic self-contradiction.
We cannot ignore the craziness, and it affects us badly - and if we desire to escape this torment-trap we are compelled to take total responsibility.
So, it can be seen that God is probably allowing this situation of official and mandatory insanity with some valid purpose: in order that we are strongly encouraged to do, that which it is most important that we do.
There is a way out-and-up, and we can each discover it; but we can only each discover it for himself.
I'm just a random passerby, just here to say: best largely ignore the the media, and instead focus on things that have proven long term value, be it great fiction, wise philosophy, or the ethos of one's religion.
ReplyDeleteThe more one pays attention to the media, the less they can think for themself.
@Pete C - Yes, indeed: http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteA few months ago I got into one of those worthless squabbles I try to avoid. A gentleman had recited the common view that all the institutions in the Western world covertly worked on behalf of the racial majority (Europeans), in order to advance its racist interests via the organs of power.
ReplyDeleteI thought about it a while and wrote back that the organs of power and the majority ethnicity were entirely separate, that the organs of power were at war with the entire human race, and the ethnic majority he thought ran the place in fact was in fact a most hated enemy.
None of this is important, really, but his response was interesting. First the gentleman was speechless to argue, so he asked me where I had received these ideas. "Who told you this? Where is this all coming from?"
I responded that they hadn't come from anywhere. They were my own thoughts.
He responded, "Oh, so you're just crazy then!"
Having encountered a truly exotic idea, the gentleman asked which institution or organization or organ of power I'd gotten this idea. Possibly I was an acolyte of organizations he already hated, or there was a hateful organization he was unaware of.
When he found out it was just me saying it, he instantly evaluated me as insane. Dangerously insane even; he blocked me, then returned to silence me when I started talking to someone else. But as you point out, this mistrust of individuals is categorical - he didn't seem to think himself fit to evaluate what I said himself, as if he didn't trust his own judgement any more than mine.
I guess this points to the central delusion of modernity - that organizations and institutions have a preternatural authority that places them like Mt. Olympus above the rest of us mere mortals. I think these entities must be "plugging into" the trustfulness that boys and girls have toward their godlike parents when they are very small children. People who Trust the Science etc. always have a distinct childlikeness, and even their assaults on nonbelievers have an infantile style of anger.
It was disturbing to witness old people during the birdemic whose spiritual auras were childish & fearful instead of elderly & wise. No doubt this was a consequence of the psychological warfare pouring out of the televisions - torture and terror seems to set people back to earlier developmental stages. Our elders should be wise; grown adults shouldn't view experts the way a baby views their parents. That was very disturbing and I'm glad it's over.