SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie is a misdemeanor, the declaration of the truth a crime.” Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time.
“The first casualty of war is truth.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html
We can dismiss
commercial advertising and government announcements as stealth lies. They mislead the public as often possible,
forever or until someone chokes the truth out of their authors. Repelled by spontaneous honesty, those people
fall back on the truth only under intense probing. Even then, they do so reluctantly and on a
provisional basis. They would rather bury
whopping lies under an avalanche of borderline truths. For them, empty monologue is better than any
balanced debate; credible lies are better than transparent truth. The lie is their duty, their rice bowl and
their source of ‘honor.’ How deluded can
anyone get?
Televised ‘debate’ opposes
contestants who accept the kleptocratic status quo with equal fervor, but whose
marginal disputes masquerade as debate.
This is standard fare in ‘balanced’ American reporting. See for yourself in the Lehrer Report, that
corporate darling on American TV.
In the United States,
“balanced reporting” means that inexcusable policies deserve more favorable
airtime on TV than reasonable ones, and more exculpatory ink in the press. Thus the unacceptable is validated by rote
repetition. Obvious sociopaths and
convicted conmen get more media adulation than honest folk; reactionaries are
paired off against conservatives, Demoblicans versus Republicrats. Their pro
forma (for the sake of appearance) arguments simulate controversy while the
underlying tyranny remains carefully undisturbed.
Another example. Industrialists confuse comparison-shoppers by
issuing household products in off-size, fractional-unit containers: 1.32 lbs.,
8.3 liquid pints, 0.7 liters: same product, different companies, different
prices. You have one minute to
solve. Serving sizes are reduced to play
down their mandatory declarations of poison content. Such ‘single serving’ portions would not
satisfy the appetite of a child.
No warning labels are
required to show that food products have been irradiated, or that they contain
genetically engineered ingredients, or that meat was raised in factory farms
cramming poisons. Everyone knows such
labels would end the sale of those experimental products. They cost much less to produce than those
they replace, yet are priced just as high or higher. It will be much harder to clean up after them
and much more costly to do so downstream in time, than is indicated by their
subsidized prices and censored labeling.
These same manufacturers
whine about the expenses they incur reporting their products’ nutritional
content: trivial sums compared to the fortunes they spend on false advertising.
Corporations bemoan
regulation. Unfortunately for them,
regulation is the only mechanism that can restrain their worst schemes. Each new regulation is a token response to
inexcusable acts of corporate malfeasance.
In the name of ‘healthy’ competition, every corporate board would copy
each new fraud if it thought it could get away with it. In the absence of additional regulation,
anyone who did not imitate his most crooked competitor would be driven out of
business. Massive corporate crime
precedes each new regulation and every follow-up corporate protest.
If you catch some
previously muted mega-corporation praising itself in new TV ads and on
full-page newspaper spreads; chances are, it is trying to drown out some recent
outrage it was caught at red-handed.
The ruinous Savings and
Loan bailout, the putrefaction of commercial airline service, runaway power
bills and recent bookkeeping scandals by enormous corporations, all demonstrate
what happens when corporations regulate themselves. Their officers are more than happy to
‘regulate’ themselves all the way to the bank.
Profiteering from the Reagan-Clinton-Bush Administrations, the corporate
oil cartel has replaced government regulation with boundless corporate
welfare. So much for the ‘free market’
and its ‘self-regulatory’ burlesque! As
expected, Adam Smith’s ‘unseen hand’ is only useful for card sharp tricks.
Let's hope those slimy
hypocrites never get their hands on the Social Security fund. They have been drooling over it for
years. If so, we’ll all grow old as
paupers despite a lifetime’s mandatory savings.
As it stands, Congress has dipped its swindlers’ hands in this till
during more than one unbalanced fiscal year.
“Stand by for this important political spoof! Instead of forcing you to watch your retirement funds vaporize in the Stock Exchange, you must report immediately to the nearest casino and gamble your retirement at house odds. May the free market triumph once and for all!”
Seriously, I’m
kidding. If only those house odds could
be made reliably profitable for the gambler or at least safe for him,
perhaps. What about a casino mulligan,
as in golf? You would get to leave with what
you walked in with, minus a small entrance fee.
Mere life support earnings, most often.
After all, these would be government-subsidized casinos on PeaceWorld.
The sudden distress of the
American middle class results from decades of 401K captive retirement savings
and their compulsory diversion into disastrous stock market investments. Such savings would vanish the moment the
stock market collapsed, as it has more and more often and exponentially worse
over time.
The term ‘deregulation’ is
secret code for “substandard service at maximum prices.” An elaboration of capitalists’ favorite
slogan: “Profits for the few, at the risk and expense of the many.” This could be the ultimate definition of
national-capitalism, the latest, most perfected form of weapon exploitation.
Commercial advertising
clogs already-restricted broadcast channels.
White
noise static gushes from the mass media. This phenomenon can only be described as a
planetary conspiracy to trivialize the important and magnify the trivial.
It just occurred to me
that 95% of all broadcast programming (films, TV, radio and the Internet) is
solely devoted to wasting the maximum amount of each individual’s spare time
while transmitting the absolute minimum of information useful to that
individual. Go listen to a few hours of
this mass-consumption gobbledygook and evaluate it for yourself. No-one analyzes user needs and targets
information to suit temperament and taste.
Preliminary attempts to do so have been attacked as invasions of
privacy.
We are
obsessive-compulsive when it comes to information flow. If it is of any utility to us, in person or
through our institutions, we hoard it, ration it and restrict its access at the
slightest provocation. We create great
trash piles of it – in accordance with our business ‘needs’ – and broadcast
that without regard to its usefulness or relevance to the end-receiver. Thus we’re buried under mountains of useless
information. This obsessive-compulsive
habit demands liberation both personal and communal.
For those of us on the
receiving end of this unsolicited babble, it is like being locked in a room
with a verbose maniac bereft of taste, culture, honesty and modesty. Our thoughts are drowned in torrents of
meaningless babble. Perverse standards
of ethics, esthetics, materialism and sexualized violence are pandered to;
criminality and its vicious suppression are the norm. Information is jammed down our throats 24/7
about useless products and services.
It’d be rather like using
a library, the shelves of which were stuffed with shoddy bookends. If all the monologue machines were shut down
simultaneously, this cumulative disinformation would be bad enough. We rapt listeners, however, repeat this
nonsense to each other all day long, and then go home to absorb another
evening’s worth. Thus do we worsen our
zombie hypnosis daily and compound our problems.
If a School Board caught
one of its teachers foisting this kind of trash on his students, it would fire
him on the spot. With perfect
justification, you would slam your front door in the face of any salesperson
who dared brainwash your children in this manner.
Yet the media mislead us
in this way by default. Criminal
disinformation disgorges from it unabated.
An equivalent output of truth might enlighten us.
Big Lies induce the
Routine of Evil, the way sugar induces tooth decay. According to professional liars, the truth is
a dough-like raw material to be molded to their employer’s convenience. Anyone ‘stupid’ enough to reject their notion
is their favorite candidate for future abuse.
Contemplate an end to such
parasitic livelihoods. This Niagara of
lies and irrelevancies would roar to a halt.
Deafening silence! Yet we would
still need products and services.
Government would still impose its dismal burden on us. In short, life would go on. But we’d stop absorbing Big Lies so
often. Mr. Honesty and Ms. Goddess might
turn out to be better friends to us without so many lessons from Big Brother
and Bimbo Borax. Who would miss all
those wanton lies, once advertising and over-packaging were eliminated?
“Sales of products are less important than we think. Just look at the communist countries: the millions of pictures of Lenin displayed everywhere you go certainly do not stimulate love of Lenin. The advertising agencies of the Communist Party (the so-called agitprop departments) have long forgotten the practical goal of their activity, (to make the communist system better liked), and have become an end in themselves: they have created their own language, their formulas, their aesthetics, (the heads of the agencies once had absolute power over art in their countries), their idea of the right life-style, which they cultivate, disseminate, and force upon their unfortunate peoples.” Milan Kundera, Immortality, Translated by Peter Kussi, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1991, p. 113. By permission of Grove/Atlantic.
Have you looked at a new
automobile lately? We are drummed to
death about how sleek, beautiful, elegant and sexy they are. Actually, they are lousy investments:
anti-social, ecocidal, elitist, hierarchical, filthy, stinking, unreliable,
counter-ergonomic, uncomfortable, dangerous, inefficient, invasive, overpriced,
poisonous, poverty-inducing, crime promoting, city destroying and guaranteed
obsolescent.
Look down on a highway
from an overpass during some clear night.
Nature never intended such a blazing cataract of fluid steel to flow
beyond the blast zone of a volcano. All
our cities have turned into volcanoes.
Such a daily waste of precious energy!
Venomous reptiles would be more attractive than those automobiles. We have turned them into one-ton key chains,
religious idols and class totems. In so
doing, we’ve done our best to ignore the obvious.
Of course, without
rational public transit our cars offer us the illusion of convenience, which
would evaporate if a small fraction of the fortune we devoted to them were
spent instead on the ultimate rationalization of public transit.
Take a moment to look
around you, the next time you walk around downtown. Note the patina of pollution that flows along
the gutter, the inescapable stink and the sepia smear that obscures the
horizon. Such real-life excreta never
disrupt pristine auto commercials, even though they flood our awareness to such
an extent we don't notice them any longer, neither the commercial blather nor
the excreta they promote. Note how decades-dry
neighborhoods flood as more and more forests are leveled and paved over to
satisfy this auto-Mammon. More
‘development’ and cheap logs in exchange for balance-of-trade-collapsing auto
and fuel imports. Note how your eyes
burn and how smog-laced pollen has turned simple hay fever into chronic asthma
in how many, now, four out of ten urban children or more?
Global warming has become
a Cosmic Phenomenon, another Act of God, whereas it’s just the output of waste
gas leaking from the exhaust pipe of our cars and power plants.
Cast your mind back to the
world of medieval burghers. We might be
tempted to sneer at their foolishness, with some justification. Among other lethal idiocies, they threw
excrement out onto the street for livestock and passersby to wallow in. Future Learners will sneer at us for much the
same reason. Just as foolishly, we
refuse to keep our soil, water and skies pure; we abuse the poor shamelessly;
and we hearken to medieval trivia instead of matters of primary importance. We are truly laughable hicks.
For most people (heck, for
almost everyone, ourselves included), truth is a matter of repetition. What we’ve heard most often, no matter how
spurious, must be the truth. We can be
persuaded that night is day, say, or that private automobiles are beautiful …
provided enough people and machines can be made to repeat it to us. Suckered into subsidizing the blitzkrieg
industry, we won’t admit this disgrace.
Instead, we pay armies of copywriters to broadcast the obvious fallacy
that automobiles are sexy. Lumps of plastic
and lacquered scrap-metal cut and wrapped by the ton, farting and drooling
poisons: sexy! According to what sexual
pervert?
Then, let’s subvert mass
transit and make its most promising technologies disappear. Finally, get everyone to repeat: “It would
just cost too much to fix, (deep sigh).”
Then there’s this other
nonsense. “Government is no good at
reducing poverty, improving education, redistributing abundance and delivering
justice. We should make government as
powerless, slow and stupid as possible.”
Regardless of its inevitable growth.
Of
course, government cannot provide such
services when reactionary legislators
make it their business to sabotage them.
However, talented Learners could empower the poor with new policies of
some imagination, if only we held the reactionaries off their backs for a
while. It is our obvious duty and
advantage to do so.
Tell me, who completed the
following projects? Emancipation from
slavery, ending the Great Depression, the Marshall Plan of economic recovery
for Europe (and its Asian equivalents), and manned space travel to the Moon,
etc. … Was it central government or a
loose gaggle of rich and powerful individuals?
Now tell me. Who triggered
slavery; the Great Depression; the collapse of Third World economies; the split
in the American economic landscape between rich plantations and a Third World
nation; corresponding despoilment of the middle class; the implosion of
rational space exploration; etc. … was it central government or a loose gaggle
of powerful, private interests with their arms deep in the till?
Of course, talented liars
and propagandists will fill some valuable niches: those of troubadour,
storyteller, actor, magician, seer, priest, shaman and Learner. A Golden Age of storytelling awaits us once
all this organized lying evaporates.
Today, we gorge on
surrogate violence, reactionary propaganda, redundant sports and soap opera
drivel. In the future, growing numbers
of Learners will pay more attention to important matters, in deadly and vital
earnest. When they take a break from
their cherished studies, they will entertain themselves with the most
outrageous fabrications that talented liars can spin: the best stories and
plays, as well as the best music, smoke, wine, food, companions and children
local ecologies may supply. But none of
this will reduce the transparency and rockbed truthfulness of Learner
government.
I can think of at least
nineteen sub-sets of the Big Lie currently mass-produced and mass consumed (it
takes two to dance this tango):
1. Dogmatic lies: fictions are asserted to be
truths despite their obvious falsehood.
Obvious lies are broadcast to a misled public and repeated by it (by
commission); or, by universal acclamation, they are passively accepted because
the evident truth is disregarded (by omission).
See global warming.
2. Simplifying lies: your judgment is too
limited to perceive the complex validity of my claim. I lie to simplify my rap. You will yield to my demands without forcing
me to go to the trouble of cultivating mutual understanding. (Representative Democracy).
In reverse mode, the
complexifying lie: my friends and I can make a relatively straightforward
transaction so complicated that only we can decode its tattered logic, fill our
wallets and empty yours. (Tax law).
3. Paternal lies: the truth would induce panic
among ignorant masses. We lie to protect
their childlike innocence. Selflessly,
we bear truths they couldn’t handle (sigh).
The fundamental question we’re sharing here, is: can professional liars
handle the truth better than the rest of us?
“Yes” is an obvious fallacy.
This lie extends to the
public practice of so-called ‘democracy.’
Majorities abandon painfully honest candidates like Ralph Nader, in
favor of “politically correct” carnival barkers and con men (take your pick of
the last seven American Presidents, their closest challengers at home and
equivalents abroad).
4. Altruistic lies: the truth would hurt you
worse than my reassuring falsehoods.
Well-meaning adults slather this lie over their children’s
awareness. Santa Claus and other
child-targeting myths persist despite their double-edged effect on
children. “Trust no one and nothing,
even under the best circumstances.” Thus
are we primed to live in total suspicion and saturated with lies.
5. Post-abuse lies: victims (and especially
their descendants) exaggerate or bury their torment, demonize their oppressors
and prejudge their oppressors’ descendants.
Ex-tormentors justify their abuse, minimize it and try to make the
public forget it. Onlookers sugarcoat
their moral cowardice by blurring their criminal negligence.
6. Self-serving lies: my interests are damaged
by your truth. They take absolute
priority over your right to learn, which is insignificant to me.
7. Weapon (and corporate) lies: every public
truth is a gift to the enemy. Any
information of a quality superior to manipulative propaganda must be
restricted. Unclassified information
must be incomplete, distorted and/or false.
Many trivial truths should be thrown in at random to confuse
things. Any admission of error is a boon
to the enemy and must be covered up.
Also, military discipline
is punishment-based. So weapon
technicians lie as often as they can to avoid punishment, maintain best-kept
secrets and report they’ve completed impossible assignments. Gobs of punishment are dished out to crush
these habits. That just induces
additional spirals of military terror at which weapon managers specialize.
8. Natural lies: I am a part your tissue or
harmless to you. Do not attack me; feed
me instead: cancers, parasites, vampires, infectious agents, embryos in the
womb, and bird’s nest mimics.
Alternately (and often reinforced by truthful exceptions), I am
poisonous or another predator or just a twig.
Don’t attack me. Alternately
again, I am full of nutritious sap—land here and pollinate me.
Another interesting
corporate fallacy asserts that manufactured pollution is ‘natural’ and
therefore acceptable because man produced it.
Man is part of nature, after all.
Was the Plague ‘valid’ because it was natural and because humans
transmitted it?
Another sub-heading of the
natural lie encompasses our perception of reality. Sensory data flood our awareness in volumes
beyond our capacity to process. In
compensation, it draws a fine trickle from this torrent and draws a picture of
reality from it. Selecting the few
stimuli it considers important, it fills the gaps creatively and weaves a
stylized, symbolic approximation of reality.
Mental sanity is defined by fidelity to gross, material reality this
abstraction defines. If every stimulus
triggered equal perception, we would be fully aware and just as helpless, like
acid-freaks or month-old infants flooded with raw stimuli.
As material beings, we lie
to ourselves every time we blink.
9. Revolutionary lies: if we must endure amidst
a stupefied populace, trapped in lies and crushed under pernicious tyranny, why
not lie like bandits to protect ourselves and reinforce the revolutionary
counter-assault? Promoting one evil to
combat a greater one: that’s a dangerous vortex to get sucked into and a
difficult one to escape. Promoting the
truth to harvest a thousand times more benefit – even if with lesser efficiency
– would that not be better?
10. Scientific lies: data conflicting with
science dogma gets shrugged off as irrelevant, dismissed without inquiry,
branded leftover superstition or, worse yet, pseudo-science. As if weapon science were not humanity’s
latest collective fantasy … at least until we change the channel during the
next set of TV commercials. Too often,
this data is written off when individuals with extraordinary gifts achieve
unique breakthroughs during momentary environmental optima. If every science doctrinaire’s grad assistant
cannot repeat those feats at the drop of a hat, they are solemnly declared
non-existent.
Believe it or not, the
question ‘why’ is forbidden by current science: another reason why so many
Learners turn their back on it. No
question should be forbidden to adult Learners, for any reason.
I suppose we should
distinguish science mentality from science technology. Science mentality includes the open-minded
flexibility, relentless honesty, clinical precision and rigorous methodology
scientists love to brag about. Its
technology produces the stink, poison, fear, pain, and overwhelming sense of
helplessness and dread that we endure; direct outcomes of the rabid
competition, closed mindedness, indifference to consequences, and lack of
fellow feeling that weapon scientists promote.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in Out of Revolution (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1938, p. 231),
quotes the French philologist Gaston Paris [my translation], who says:
“I profess this doctrine absolutely and without reserve: that Science has no other object than the truth for its own sake, without any compunction about practical consequences, good or bad, regrettable or beneficent. Anyone who permits himself – through patriotism, religion or even morality – the least dissimulation, the slightest alteration of the facts he studies or the conclusions he draws, is not worthy of his place in the Great Laboratory, where the admission ticket of honesty is even more fundamental than that of capability. Thus understood and pursued in the same spirit in every civilized country, communal studies form a Great State that spans restrictive, diverse and often hostile nations; a State no war can sully, no conqueror can menace, where our souls may find the shelter and unity that the City of God once provided.”
It would be hard to find a
more passionate pledge of allegiance to Absolute Science. This fanatical defense of Absolute Truth (or
any other Absolute, for that matter) induces more devastating results than any
other lie listed here. The Absolute is
ideal terrain for brutal simplification; and the most efficient form of
simplification seems to be mass murder and political terror.
11. Hermetic lies: in order to promote internal
morale and cohesion, we secret fellows should adopt weighty oaths of silence
and mutual aid, identifying gestures, elaborate signal codes and clandestine
rituals. Hermetic organizations (like the
early Christians, Freemasonry and weapon management) lend themselves to
accusations of depraved conspiracy, whether true or not. They permit battle elites to indulge in their
favorite perversions. Penetrating secret
societies with inbred proficiency, info elites persecute hermetics from above,
corrupt them from within and slander them from below.
12. Bureaucratic lies: many bureaucrats justify
their budget by withholding significant information. The rarer their information content and the
more difficult they make it to acquire, the more
valuable its guardians seem to be and the larger their bureaucracies may
grow. Under intense pressure from
special interests (both private and corporate), bureaucracies adopt covert
agendas that contradict their public mandates.
Disguising this contradiction is a critical skill for civilian agencies
in a weapon bureaucracy, since otherwise, their costs and benefits would be
withheld in favor of more weapons expenditure.
Examples abound. Distorted ‘success statistics’ come to mind
from the Prohibition Era, from unemployment counts (always shrunken in official
reports), from safety studies of atomic energy, from official reports on the
Vietnam War and the ongoing War against Druggies.
In many cases of
misinformation politics, bureaucrats start believing their data tabulations are
creating reality instead of merely quantifying it. Whatever statistics they crank out, that is
reality as far as they’re concerned.
Another common lying
technique pegs ‘acceptable’ levels of pollutants, crime and other negative
fallouts at current levels, then sets ‘unacceptable’ ones much higher. Base dosages may be extremely toxic, but
they’re officially declared tolerable in order to postpone mitigation efforts
and reduce corporate overheads.
Officially ‘acceptable’ levels may mask real threats until spectacular
catastrophes force self-informed victims to raise the alarm, all by themselves
and at their own expense. Responsible
officials may have been briefed on the problem beforehand, but they block new
findings at every turn. They are rarely
held accountable for subverting the truth, and often rewarded.
For example, just before
the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown of 2011, the official level of tolerable
background radiation was arbitrarily doubled. And no-one warned us that its ultimate
consequence could be the sterilization of the Northern Hemisphere. Typical, runaway weapon technology: like the
accidental discharge of a pistol during its cleaning.
There is another method of
statistical distortion in current use.
Many statistics are under-reported or over-reported deliberately, then
hugely revised years later. A long
series of revisions over time makes the scientific interpretation of those
numbers very problematic. Inaccurate
predictions based on them reduce the public’s profit and increase the profits
of the few with something to hide.
Bureaucrats often
trivialize the worst consequences of their policies. This attenuation of unforeseen consequences
takes the form of bad counts at the collection level, tampering by partisan
intermediaries, and distortions at the top, where unfavorable sub-categories
may be entirely eliminated. Favorable
statistics are often accumulated using reverse techniques. The greater the pressure for specific results,
the more distorted the official tallies.
Often, anecdotal evidence collected at the grass roots reveals local
conditions more accurately than ‘scientific’ compilations of official
statistics.
These numbers must pass
through multiple tiers of reviewing authorities, each tier more isolated from
the phenomenon being tabulated and more inclined to distort official results to
suit its agenda. Finally, crafty
statisticians may manipulate these numbers to reach any conclusion desired.
It is easy for weapon
societies to sweep unforeseen consequences under the rug, since we are
convinced beforehand that such disasters are unavoidable.
13. Lying by deliberate omission: reactionary
candidates for public office and high judgeship refuse to specify their position
on controversial topics. Their evasion
may not bear the stink of direct lies, but their right not to incriminate
themselves does not equal that of a criminal suspect. After all, high office and public policy are
at risk here, not mere criminal punishment.
During a job interview, the least suspicion of unsuitability should be
grounds for immediate dismissal; so should any candidate’s tendency to disguise
their prejudices.
Of course, complex systems
of checks and balances can only control a few deviants who refuse to act in
good faith. No
system will work when majorities embrace Conspiracies of Greed with
gusto. Some overriding moral principle must
come into play. Otherwise, we’ll have to
await the next spectacle of unforeseen consequences to blow all this manure
away. Be warned: once the shit storm
hits the fan, it will not be at all pleasant downwind.
People keep forgetting
that bad behavior has consequences.
Improper behavior should be suppressed for that reason. Idealism holds its ultimate reward, not for
its own sake, but because it produces better outcomes through miracles of
generosity. I am ashamed to have to
remind Learners of this obvious truth: any society that has to defend idealism
to itself, against a public opinion majority taught to reject it, has obviously jammed its bearings.
14. Meme-lies: some
fanatics find their chosen dogma deeply satisfying. Yet their most cherished beliefs may reflect
unique circumstances and aspirations, and may be quite inappropriate for other
people. To bolster their fragile egos,
personal insecurities, feelings of low self-esteem and powerlessness, other people
must accept those fanatical ideas, even if they contradict those
peoples’ perceived needs. If enough
fanatics share this belief, they may become powerful enough to injure those who
threaten them with disagreement. The
more deeply held the belief and the more passionate the believers, the greater
the likelihood of trouble.
Only practitioners of Satyagraha
may overcome this paradox, of which more in its own chapters.
15. Weapon mentality lies: everyone recites the
same ‘truths’ even though we all know they are lies. Talented weapon mentors earn big bucks to
refine, revise and re-broadcast these untruths ad infinitum. Effective
dissent is silenced – whatever the cost – until obvious lies replace the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth… Even if this corruption takes a
thousand years and even if it creates another thousand years of social
contradiction and deadly turmoil.
16. Sports lies: as long as my buddies and I
stick to sports babble, we can ignore gigantic and stubborn social
problems.
Injustice prevails when
strangers may not discuss serious problems without risking unforeseen
violence. So sports babble becomes a
magical incantation, the most acceptable means of disarming animosity and
sidetracking debate, and the lowest common denominator of mutual
irresponsibility. Any adult who
dismisses his contribution to critical thought and social activism as
unnecessary, is an idiot in the Greek
sense of the term: an over-aged child.
Mass media sources sustain
this idiocy. They spoon-feed tepid pap
to the info proletariat and withhold complex and controversial topics.
One day, I walked into two
bars at random and got crushed between two wide-screen TVs and their broadcast
sports blare. I was struck by the fact
that – in millions of identical places… just about the last public places
allowed – absolutely no valid information was being transmitted 24/7/365.
It is time we began
reasoning like adults. We could start by
forcing the media to retrieve, like good bird dogs, our social truths in all
their complexity.
17. Self-lies are the most insidious. They take any form described above but should
be listed separately.
You are the only one who
can correct such a falsehood, once it has taken hold in your skull. Like Scrooge in Dickens’
A Christmas Tale, a self-lie victim
must witness the painful after-effects of his delusion in order to
detoxify. This process wastes valuable
time, demands superhuman courage, drags out the suffering of innocents and
induces unbearable guilt in those who repent.
How would our lives differ
if we surrounded ourselves with more truth preemptively?
18. The simplifying lies of denial: “Whatever it
is, it can never be true or ever succeed.
That did not just happen. That is
false, no matter how true it sounds.
That person cannot be what he claims to be. No matter into what catastrophe we appear to
be headed, it will no doubt work out fine in the long run.” Based on the fear of lacking an elegant
reply.
19. The lies of art and creativity: Ah! How much sadder life would be without
them! Our withdrawal from misery, my
friends, not “pursuit of happiness.”
The first symptom of the
Routine of Evil is a proliferation of Big Lies.
From a Learner perspective, lying is energy consumptive in a world where
every joule is precious; it leads to errors of fact, reason and action; it is
degrading, insulting and vulgar. Like
other forms of insolence, lying takes more effort, in the end, than does
adhering frankly to the truth. It is
difficult to embrace evil and still adhere to some semblance of the truth
without massive self-delusion. So
truthfulness might just help us distinguish right from wrong.
Knowledge is wealth. Lying is theft. What would weapon mentality have you do? Do the opposite.
Gandhi’s stipulations were
categorical. According to him, Good,
Truth and Non-violence are one and the same, each reflects the other. Evil, Violence and Untruth are
self-reinforcing aspects of our delusion of ‘separateness from the
Universe.’ Lies, cruelty and
power-hunger are just different flavors of violence. There is no such thing as a ‘small lie’ or an
‘acceptable level of violence.’ May we
embrace his wisdom!
Gandhi believed that
people should make impossible demands on themselves in order to learn from
their mistakes. According to him,
politics offer a supreme challenge to moral beings: the same way
tightrope-walking offers more challenge than strolling along a boulevard. Heightened risk makes the business more
interesting. Besides, who is supposed to
run politics? Crooks?
Gandhi strode the sheer
path of total service and tragic optimism, the glorious path of Buddha and
Jesus. Only superhuman heroes would dare
follow in their footsteps. We vicious
cowards must witness their brilliant trajectories from afar, amidst our glowing
embers of Hell.
Momentary redemption may
come to us by establishing a Learner Commonwealth on PeaceWorld. As far as I am concerned, only reincarnation
in Christ’s lifeline could allow us to open the escape hatch to final
redemption, for Gandhi’s, Buddha’s and everyone else’s reincarnated soul.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld
to PeaceWorld