The Oxford Dictionary team announced that the 2016 word of the year was “post-truth”. It means we’re done with facts, correct information and meaningful knowledge. We have entered a new era in which these reliable tools have been dumped, in favor of emotion, propaganda, opinions, beliefs and Facebook “likes”.
Wiki sites (edited by anybody and everybody) are now king. A correct entry can be overwritten by a clown who chooses not to accept the current information on that topic. If you try to post something which is not “politically correct”, you will be censured and probably even deleted. Gut feelings are all the rage; verified information is out.
Channeled information from some supposed super-spook, via a self-professed spiritual medium (but earning mega millions of dollars), is now elevated to something semi-sacred. It MUST be true, because it was spoken from “beyond”, seems to be the accepted criterion. It’s rarely mentioned that channeled information never falls outside what is already known, to any schoolchild who can read with facility, but dull old facts dressed up in fancy rhetoric.
If you claim to step outside your body every day (like Waldo Vieira) then you are automatically a demi-god, whose words are hung on like scriptural truths by tens of thousands of followers (without any means to tell if Vieira is actually mad or lying).
If you have 100,000 followers on Twitter or Facebook, that makes you a celebrity today. Your beliefs and opinions are valued beyond the expostulations of a mere time-served university professor or careful research scientists.
In fact, talking of celebrities and pop stars, these weird misfit human beings—who manifestly cannot live capable or meaningful lives—are regarded with an awe bordering on reverence by the vast majority of people, most of whom have only the dimmest grasp of what truth actually means.
It’s very depressing.
Life After Death
One of the fashionable ways to get rich is write a book about something you don’t know, can never know and cannot experience. Such a topic would be what happens when we die.
I’m not totally surprised or particularly disgusted when certain writers claim that the after life starts out in a furnished room, pretty much like the one you just left. There are flowers and curtains, tables and chairs, all pretty much like the “real” world, they tell us. Then you are supposed to “ascend” through more and more advanced levels, till “pop”, you suddenly discover your are non-material spiritual being.
By about the fourth level, as one earnest writer informed us, people don’t go on strike any more! (I tossed the book with a scoff at that point). He tells us that Jesus comes to talk to him every single day. That’s serious name-dropping. To me it means he’s barking mad. But to others, that proves he’s got it right.
Thing is, I’m not upset by his drivel. But I am utterly astonished that intelligent readers could fall for this pseudo-knowledge baloney. Look: everything he says could be true. I can’t prove it isn’t! But how the hell would this twerp actually know? Has he died and been reborn, to come and report to us everything he discovered on his travels? Of course not. Therefore it is not knowledge. His writing is a waste of paper.
It’s depressing because there are people now running courses and seminars along the lines of “how to become an expert in your field in six weeks or less”. The advice is to write a book. You have a book, so you must be an expert. Don’t worry even if anybody even reads the book; it gives you credibility to be an “established” author.
From there on out, you just push the book, push the book, push the book… with luck, you will find yourself being interviewed about it on one or more radio stations. You’re on your way! You are becoming a recognized authority (seriously, this is what’s out there!)
I could give you a whole list of such fake authors in my own field; holistic medicine. Some are very famous, with a far larger following than me. Is that because they know more than me? Or because they understand aggressive and phoney marketing?
Whereas I would far rather read a few more books in depth and increase my knowledge base. Increasingly, that seems to me a rather naïve approach to success!
Lying and faking it is quicker, easier and far more remunerative.
Systems
People are consciously or unconsciously fixated on boundaries and systems. They are hoping for whatever can be delivered through a system.
But freedom isn’t a system. Truth can’t be systematized. Truth is to be lived.
I have come across some pretty weird systems and always been astonished that people will look for solutions in that direction. One writer (now dead) who I admired a lot back in the 1960s created something called “Knowledgism”. In it, he presumed to tell us all that there are 25 universes, all named and in sequence, and we are supposed to acknowledge this. I don’t feel there is freedom in any system with such dominating arrogance as to presume to tell me what universes I may experience!
Another system—Keylontic Science—insists there are 15 dimensions to reality. On one of their websites, I found a haze of pseudo-science, including:
“Ancient Science of the Shields” (scalar-standing-wave templates of matter and consciousness), “Merkaba Mechanics” (interdimensional electromagnetic vortex mechanics), “DNA Template Activations” (frequency accretion within the scalar template behind manifest chemical DNA), in addition to said 15-Dimensional Anatomy.
At least the batty woman running this site had the grace to admit that these “teachings” cannot at this time be “proved or disproved”.
I asked an otherwise sensible lady friend of mine, a keylontic believer, why she espoused this fatuous approach to reality, with no opening to actually demonstrate its truth, and she replied that it “resonated”. With this as a standard of truth or fact, then of course there is no hope for Humankind.
This is the post-truth world, where something that “resonates” is senior to fact and observation. It’s like Big Bang scientists saying, “It may not be true but we really like the story”! We might as well all sign up to something because we like the color of the guru’s robe.
Ad Hominems
Unfortunately, the media landscape and the educational system being what they are now, most people aren’t equipped to analyze a major subject and separate truth from fiction. All they can do is accuse their opponents of base and ulterior motives. That’s the only card they can play. They latch on to Subject X, they favor Position A, and from that moment on anyone who favors Position B is a liar, a charlatan, a hired hand of The Forces of Evil. That’s the beginning and the end of their “investigation.”
These attacks on the person, not the argument, we call ad hominems and our age is drowning in this vicious detestation [Latin: Ad hominem=”toward/against the man,” rather than “against the argument the man is making”].
As I am writing this (on a ship in the Aegean Sea), there has come news of a snap general election in the UK. British Prime Minister Theresa May, tired of being blocked in executing the Brexit process, has said, “Let the country decide if they really want me to push this through.” (Note the public already voted YES to Brexit, in a referendum).
Opposition (Labour Party) loonies, like Chuka Ummuna, raged that Mrs. May is “a disgrace” and that she “rejects the idea of an opposition in our democracy.” Notice that asking the public to vote what they want is reclassified in emotionally nihilistic terms like “dictatorship” and “wanting to put an end to democracy”. Calling for a vote must not be allowed, because it would crush the opposition party (who are in abject disarray at present and quite un-electable).
This is turning a clever political finesse into a tirade against the person. Get the idea?
The notion of ad hominem was understood at least as far back as ancient Rome. To the Romans, argumentum ad hominem (argument toward the man), indicated a flaw in reasoning, a piece of misdirection, a distraction from a thorough analysis of the argument itself.
You can’t win the argument by logic or reason, so you attack the person. It’s a confession of paucity of ideas; an admission you can’t hold your corner.
But not any more. It’s now the way the masses discuss their affairs…
These days, we see the escalation of crude and unthinking personal attacks: “Oh, he’s just saying that because he’s a Democrat/Republican.” “He’s just saying that because he’s in the pay of Big Pharma.” “He’s defending that position because he’s a racist.” “If he doesn’t agree with me, he must be a CIA agent.” “He’s a nut. He’s been discredited.” “Are democrats so stupid they don’t realize they are stupid?”
I’ve heard people I once considered intelligent and knowledgeable dismiss Donald Trump as a “war monger”. “He’s a bigot. A racist.” “He’s a dictator.” “He’s a Russian puppet,” (coupled with “Putin is KGB,” as if that meant anything). The fact that the NSA and even Wiki Leaks, no less, have said that there is no evidence whatever of Russian hacking or interference with the election carries no weight with these dyed-in-the-wool democrats; “That’s fake news,” they declared. “The truth is obvious, we don’t have to prove anything.”
People have become lazy and think that arguments can be summed up by the character or background of the participants to the debate. It’s too much trouble for them to carry out logical research of their own, and contrast that experience with simply making flip accusations against people they don’t agree with.
In an atmosphere where ad hominems prevail, things cannot resolve or improve. The situation gets worse. Eventually, as Jon Rappoport warns us, the dominant groups adopt a few stock attacks against everyone who doesn’t think the way they think. Rolled out with enough volume and ferocity, they can prevent a person with a different point of view from being heard at all in their controlled “safe space.”
So at this time, anyone who expresses caution at unlimited immigration is derided as uncaring, inhuman and fascist. The solid argument that security is impossible to maintain without effective borders cuts no ice with these dudes. The matter of who is to pay for all the extra mouths that need feeding remains a “non-issue” for them. Anyone who doesn’t welcome the hordes of aliens, many of whom are clearly desperadoes with evil intentions, is guilty of outright racism. Such a person is “evil”.
The British schoolboy had an expression with a similar psychology, which was to scream down the competition mindlessly, “Yah boo sucks!” Which roughly translated means “I’m not listening; I hate you; I don’t care what you say; I’m NOT listening; I’m not LISTENING…!” It’s the opposite of reasoned thought and debate.
And this is no small cancer. Juvenile idiot and fraudster Mark Zuckerburg, with no intelligence to back up his ideas, has taken down all Facebook websites which support the French candidate Marine Le Pen, because she is “against immigration”. Zuckerburg is thus perverting the due process of democracy in someone else’s government and is to be judged totally evil… his own demented opinions are RIGHT and everyone who think otherwise is a fascist, a neo-Nazi, a community thug (which of course Zuckerburg is in his way).
The man who cheated the founders of Facebook is one of the greatest international criminals of all time, in terms of what he stands for and what he has done. He has silenced the right of a civilized nation to choose its own destiny by due process.
Spin Doctoring Creating The Matrix
Then, above and beyond the individual’s personal failure at analyzing truth comes the deliberate, cynical and far-reaching manipulation of “reality” by
For decades they have been feeding us “fake news”, designed to create a world which does not exist but in which people can be frightened and exploited; a world in which draconian measures are introduced, to “keep us safe from terrorism” or to “prevent global warming”; a world in which people will willingly surrender their liberty and rights, in the belief it is “necessary” and will make them safe; a world which is to be controlled, not by governments and the people, but mysterious globalist cabals and the enmeshing spider webs of international business cartels, none of which are answerable to anyone’s government, elected or otherwise.
I doubt you notice the fine weave of the fabric coming across in the news; it’s deliberately designed to create obscurity and uncertainty, except for what they want you to think. But if you did look at the detail, you would be astonished at the number of “facts” that are spewed forth which have no basis at all in reality. They just make it up and keep saying it, till it starts to stick. Follow the announcements for any length of time and you will soon suspect that the main definition of “real facts” from the newsrooms seems to be: we are saying it, therefore ipso facto (by virtue of that) it is the truth.
At the time of writing, months after the US 2016 election was over, CNN is still circulating their made up story of Russian hacking of the outcome. They will throw in discredited stories that other news networks soundly rejected, to “prove” they were right all along and Trump stole the election.
Whoa! What?
That’s horrible. But then, with breathtaking hypocritical effrontery, they dare to attack people who have earnestly pointed out that the media—all media—are liars, criminals, cheesy and trashy, peddling worthless agendas are now spreading “fake news”. It’s mind-boggling.
The only fake news, I assure you, is the stuff that mainstream media peddle as fact. What’s more, they have been doing it for decades. But suddenly there is a new expression abroad, “fake news”, which supposedly comes from those nasty people circulating facts we won’t allow, we don’t agree with and we don’t want entering people’s minds.
The ONLY fake news is the media, but somehow they have the expression to now apply to anyone who states the truth. Pretty impressive (but creepy)!