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Reviving the Spirit of Existential Rebellion in a World of Propaganda, Lies and Self Deception 

November 9, 2017

Reviving the Spirit of Existential Rebellion in a World of Propaganda, Lies and Self Deception 

Photo by Mónica Leitão Mota | CC BY 2.0

Search for nothing anymore, nothing
except truth.
Be very still and try to get at the truth.

And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I?

– D. H. Lawrence, “Search For Truth” 

Like existential freedom, honesty and truth-seeking demand a perpetually renewed commitment. No one ever fully arrives, and all of us are blown off course on the journey.  Even when we think we have reached our destination, we are often startled by the enigma of arrival, and must set sail again.  We are all in the same boat. The search for truth is a process, an experiment, an essay – a trying without end.

Yet surely it is not an exaggeration to say that most people are liars and self-deceivers.  Honesty, while touted as a virtue, is practiced far less than it is praised.  There is almost nothing that people are less honest about than their attitudes toward honesty.  Few think of themselves as dishonest, and even to hint that someone is so is received as a great insult that usually elicits an angry response.  So most people follow the advice of the character Jean-Baptiste Clamence from Albert Camus’ The Fall: “promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can.”  In that way you satisfy your own and others’ secret desires for deception and play-acting, and other people will love you for it.

However, it is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy.  Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Downright Sinister Rearrangement of Riches

October 27, 2017

The Downright Sinister Rearrangement of Riches 

Simple Classifications

Let’s begin with facts.  Cold hard unadorned facts. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit at standard atmospheric pressure.  Squaring the circle using a compass and straightedge is impossible.  The sun is a star.

The sun is not just a star, it is a benevolent star. Look, it is smiling…  sort of. [PT]

Facts, of course, must not be confused with opinions, which are based upon observations.  Barack Obama throws like a girl.  The Federal Register is for idiots.  Two slices of chocolate cake are one too many.  Are these opinions right or wrong?

The answer depends on who you ask.  What’s certain about opinions, however, is that like bellybuttons, everybody has one.  Moreover, unlike free drugs from the government, everyone is in fact entitled to their own opinion.

Moving on from facts and opinions, the next classification we encounter is the wholly asinine.  This broadly contains the absurd and ridiculous.  Take most university teachers, barring natural science professors, for instance.  They’re wholly asinine.  The wholly asinine also extends to editors at the New York Times, Washington Post, circus hunchbacks, and the like.

Lastly, we want to mention the downright sinister.  This includes sociopaths like Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, nearly all of Congress, the Federal Reserve, fractional reserve banking, Washington lobbyists, a good part of Wall Street, and much, much more.  Clearly, such people and professions don’t represent honest work.  Rather, they epitomize less than honest work that’s performed by less than honest people.
Sinister mafia boss from Arkansas, possibly checking classified material on private phone… [PT]     Photo credit: AP

Nixon Casts the Die

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

James Howard Kunstler: It’s Time To Be Honest With Ourselves

August 28, 2017

James Howard Kunstler: It’s Time To Be Honest With Ourselves

The major systems our society relies on are failing
The ever-eloquent James Howard Kunstler returns to our podcast this week to discuss the dangers of the ‘comprehensive dishonesty’ he observes in our culture today.

We occupy ourselves with distractions (e.g., the fear du jour that our media continually manufactures) and diversions (e.g., our empty social media addiction), while ignoring the erosion of the essential systems around us. Making matters worse, the leaders we assume are focusing on these issues aren’t or are woefully out of their depth.

It’s time for society to take a hard look in the mirror and be honest about the shortcoming it sees. Identifying them then opens the door to deciding what to do about them.

Without the courage to be honest, we condemn ourselves to a failing status quo that likely has little remaining time left:

What we’re seeing is the result of behavior of people who have no idea what they’re doing. Most of the major systems that we rely on are entering a state of failure of one kind or another. And, of course, the larger problem is that they’re interlinked, and that their failures will be mutual and self-amplifying.

These systems include the energy system that has powered industrial civilization, the oil and gas industries which you’ve talked about a lot and I think that our listeners understand pretty well — although the finer points of it, like the ‘energy return on investment’, is something that’s certainly not understood by the general public, or most of the officers in our government, and certainly not in the New York Times, Washington Post or other major media outlets. They just don’t get that.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The High Cost of Honesty in a Sea of Low-Cost BS

September 2, 2016

The High Cost of Honesty in a Sea of Low-Cost BS

As the cost of propagating BS drops to near-zero, the value of honestly achieved analyses and conclusions rises proportionately. 

Longtime correspondent Michael M. recently recommended this long-form article  The Market For Lemons, The Market For Bullshit, And The Great Cascading Credence Crash Of 2016.

The article discusses the soaring market for self-serving narratives, rigged statistics like the jobs report and unemployment, and officially sanctioned PR campaigns aimed at creating approval (or passive acceptance of) a corrupt, phony status quo.

All bubbles, even the one in distributing BS, eventually pop, decimating all who relied on the bubble for their livelihood.

Michael’s comments were thought-provoking:

“Honesty requires more time to analyze if bullshit is being peddled and customized towards you (after you have honestly presented your opinion).”

“Technology is primarily being used to replicate bullshit quicker and at almost zero cost.”

Michael had previously sent the following comments in response to a link in Musings 27 on honesty:

“THE ABILITY TO BE HONEST is a very good point. I understand it as having the strength  and time (!) to carry the consequences of being honest.

Being honest makes you more vulnerable, for as you become predictable, you are easier to game and you have fewer options to respond to weird/ crazy/ offensive behavior.

You need extra time to constantly ask yourself if offers or opinions presented to you (after you have honestly presented your opinion) are true, or marketing versions (BS) that have been tailored for you.”

The gist of the “market for BS” article is that BS is now so cheap to distribute and so over-abundant that the “market for BS”, i.e. its believability, will soon crash.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

More Probable Than Not

May 13, 2015

More Probable Than Not

My father was a doctor who spent his entire career in a small hospital built by the Tennessee Coal and Iron company in Fairfield, Alabama. He was an ER doc way before emergency medicine was its own thing, which meant that he saw a wide gamut of cases, from knife fights to car wrecks to heart attacks. But it also meant that he saw a lot of ordinary colds and various infectious diseases, as the emergency clinic then – as now – was the only on-demand medical facility available for people who couldn’t afford or didn’t have access to private physician practices. Now one of my father’s great joys in life was watching sports on our grainy black and white TV, miraculously upgraded to a grainy color TV when I was 12. I’m sure he spent hundreds, if not thousands, of happy hours watching sports. Unless, of course, the hapless TV commentator made the mistake of excusing the absence of, say, Larry Bird from a Celtics game by saying that Bird “had a touch of the flu” and so was too sick to play, which was guaranteed to send my father into a 10-minute tirade.

“A touch of the flu? A touch of the flu? You mean he has contracted the influenza virus? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea what it means to have the flu? Do you have any idea how sick you are if you have the flu? People DIE from the flu, you moron! What does that even mean … a touch of the flu? Is Larry Bird in the hospital? Because if he has influenza, you sure better get him to the hospital! I hope you’ve got a saline IV hooked up to Larry Bird’s arm right now! No, he’s not in the hospital. Do you know why? Because he has a COLD. That’s right, you idiot, he has a COLD! Not the flu!”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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