Posted on 01/01/2024 4:56:38 AM PST by MtnClimber
Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality.
Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality.
Hopefully, I posted that enough times for folks to be able to absorb it. I have posted the following several times on Free Republic and will post it yet again:
It's not so much what you don't know that will get you in trouble, it IS what you know THAT AIN'T SO.
~ Mark Twain
Later read.
I missed this when you posted it three years ago. It’s a great paper. Thanks.
It is indeed long. For anyone tempted to skip it, I would suggest reading a bit of the earlier sections to understand the author’s terminology, then go to the section, “The Caprice of the Party.” That is such a great capsulization of false intellectual movements throughout the ages (Communism, DEI, Climate Change, etc), that you will want to read more.
(And I don’t say the just because I have lately been thinking of Climate Change fanatics as modern Pharisees.)
Bottom line is, it’s a great road map for understanding and rejecting ideas that “only an intellectual could believe.”
The recent CoVid debacle is a result of psychopathy at the highest levels of our defense industry.
If you refused the vaccine you were guilty of rejecting pseudo-reality, the unpardonable sin.
Our government has created and/or enabled an Inequity pseudo-reality that finds itself severely challenged by Trump, an even bigger sin.
Insurrection my reality-based ass.
This paper is pseudo-profound. The author has supported Democratic Party candidates, including volunteering for Barack Obama, and was part of the New Atheism movement.
So the bottom line remains, how does any well-meaning person distinguish between reality and propaganda? It’s not an easy problem to solve.
Pieper’s 1970 essay is worth study as well, though it is slow going in places. The whole phenomenon is the basis of Orwell’s 1984. We are living in it today.
Consider the spreading gender insanity, and the catastrophic manmade global warming scenario as prime examples.
IMO it’s more about character than intelligence. Of course you are free to disagree.
I always thought the same, but classified some as educated, and some as educated beyond their ability to understand. Many degreed people seem to have a grasp of a great many facts by rote, but are unable to internalize it rationally.
I highly recommend reading Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, as a sort of primer on the discourse among the “educated” that led to truth becoming subject to the narrative rather than the other way around.
They are totalitarian, and they are wrong, and we don't know ourselves because it's easier to complain about someone else.
One such recent example of this IMHO is the “Happy Kwanzaa” BS that certain businesses spout after Christmas. The particular business who posted this is Wegmans, the Rochester, NY based grocery store chain. When I pushed back against this charade, the chorus of virtue signalers couldn’t hold back saying in one case that this is an example of the “melting pot” that is America. When confronted with the fact that a black, socialist separatist started this BS in the 1960s, I was told by one erudite virtue signaler that I was “fucking stupid”. These people have bought the lie and NOTHING will convince them otherwise.
But, but, but, it’s our Christmas, it’s no longer theirs. Isn’t it good that my birthday is not yours?
I got a lot from this; he is quite erudite.
I know this piece was only an excerpt, so I may be commenting from ignorance of some other statements he might have made. But I found in his use of the term “epistemic” a category which he never really filled. There was no definition of what is true-reality, and how it can be known.
I have a couple of terse additions:
1. True reality is that which is universal, necessary and certain, and it always conforms to what we call “logic”.
2. True reality is grounded in the Root of all Being, which is the God of the Bible.
Violate those two and you have a decapitated sense of reality, or, as the writer asserts, “pseudo-reality”.
bookmark
Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.
Not a single devotee of waging war over thus is penetrable with any facts that they vehemently disagree with. They are even willing to ignore glaring facts, of which there is no dispute whatsoever.
The title is misleading.
Lindsay doesn’t go into the basic premise at length: psychopaths are the underlying cause and constructors of totalitarianism.
It’s a point I’ve made on this forum a number of times over the last two decades. It’s clear now that the history of the European monarchs shows that collectively, they are a clade of psychopaths of varying degree. So were the Asian “emperors” and their modern counterparts, the Communist dictators.
It’s actually a natural thing. Psychopaths live on manipulating others. And, they are relentless. So they never quit trying to dominate others using all means available to them.
Charlemagne forced all tribal leaders to kneel to him as if he were a deity. That was a hilarious concept since he claimed that the Christian deity had anointed him to rule. It’s really ordinary psychopathic behavior - using intimidation and extortion to force a non-psychopath to grovel. It’s what they live for. The idea that this means “God chose me to be king” is precisely what the American Revolution was fought over: denying that “Divine Right”.
But being who they are, they won’t quit. They’ll always be trying.
Comment: every federal worker, every police officer, every member of the “government” should be REQUIRED to take one of the psychopath profiling tests: PCL-R or later developments. The results should be public. And above a certain score should disqualify you from office.
Bttt
Quite a few radical abolitionist diefied today by woke and uniparty also fit this bill
Funding murderers to go south and kill slave owning families and when exposed little to no accountability
Some parallels tween now and then
Blurring of objective realities of 1000s of years in an eye blink
Self righteous morality indignation mostly from puritan stock who had a history of it
And like the left projected what they themselves were guilty of on others ….rebellion …a history of it from Washington on
bump
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