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From One Ignorance to the Next

April 27, 2024

From One Ignorance to the Next

Is humanity a herd of animals, doomed to follow its rulers to slaughter?

There is a tendency to view history as if it were a personified being, as if it has a mind of its own and is trying to accomplish predetermined goals for humanity. One version of this view is that history moves toward liberating man from oppressive regimes. Marx claimed that history moved determinately through stages according to prevailing modes of production, roughly going from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism, and ultimately to socialism. Modern neoliberals or neoconservatives might say that history is a process of “the people” being given more of a voice in their government—a view that conveniently means the current system that provides the elite with power and job security is the ultimate end of history.

Personally, I view history as ultimately a product of Providence. However, God works in mysterious ways, and allows us to be the agents of change within whatever His ultimate plan for history is. Thus the question for what causes change from one period of history to the next is not as simple as saying it is whatever God wills. Even embracing Providence, we can still ask whether any patterns emerge in how human beings ambulate from one period of history to the next.

Thus, it occurs to me that a case can be made for viewing the progression between historical periods as the product of a series of “veils of ignorance” being removed from people’s minds, only to be replaced with new ones under which they can still be ruled but under new systems of government.

person covering the eyes of woman on dark room
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

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Ignorance, Hubris, and Stupidity

March 3, 2024

Ignorance, Hubris, and Stupidity

Artwork from Ken Avidor

As I frequently point out, we face a series of predicaments all brought to us as a result of our own behavior of using technology, which has produced the predicament of ecological overshoot. When a species goes into overshoot, it always faces the same outcome: collapse. There is quite literally no way to avoid this; it is baked into cake, so to speak. I frequently hear people talk about avoiding collapse to which I can only chuckle and explain that attempting to avoid collapse and extend civilization is a fool’s errand because all this does is steepen the Seneca Cliff once the ability to extend civilization dries up. Civilization exists upon the surplus energy provided by technology use such as that furnished through agriculture; this then provides the ability of humans to develop permanent settlements which is the beginning of a civilization. Sadly, civilizations are unsustainable and each one that has ever come into being has also collapsed. Today’s civilization is no different and there will never be a sustainable civilization. Talk of such ideas is no different than “sustainable” development or “green” growth (see greenwashing).

I genuinely want people to understand the truth about where we are within these systems and predicaments and what can and cannot be done about them. Most people’s responses are fueled by a desire to “fight” one of the symptom predicaments such as climate change or energy and resource decline. Sadly, a considerable number of those folks read or hear something about stopping or reversing climate change or emissions or any other symptom predicament and get the incorrect idea that this is actually possible…

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Technology: Distracting, Disturbing, Deceiving & Deluding Ourselves to Death

January 28, 2019

TECHNOLOGY: DISTRACTING, DISTURBING, DECEIVING & DELUDING OURSELVES TO DEATH

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. 

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Image result for huxley amusing ourselves to death

Something as mundane as using the restroom at work sometimes ends up triggering deeper thoughts about technology – its benefits, deficiencies and danger to our culture. I’ve been using the same restroom at work for the last twelve years. They remodeled the restroom a few years ago with the latest technology – automatic flushers, automatic soap dispensers, automatic spigots, and automatic towel dispenser. This technology is supposed to make things better, but from my perspective the technology just added complexity, glitches and unnecessary complications.

First off, these technological “improvements” did not eliminate any humans from the equation. The housekeepers responsible for the restrooms continued to be employed. Prior to the remodel they would fill a metal bin with individual paper towels and fill the soap dispenser with liquid soap. Now they have to insert a roll of paper towels in the electronic dispenser and a cartridge of soap in the electronic soap dispenser.

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The State weaponizes education to create ignorance

November 11, 2018

The State weaponizes education to create ignorance

Independent Education: the crisis and the crossroad

A hundred fifty years ago, at least some Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on the use of the faculty called Reason.

Formal debate, science, and law all flowed from that source.

A common bond existed in some schools of the day. The student was expected to learn how Reason operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as on a long table, the visible principles: Logic.

This was accepted.

But now, this bond is gone.

The independence engendered by the disciplined study of logic is no longer a desired quality in students.

The classroom, at best, has taken on the appearance of a fact-memorization factory; and we should express grave doubts about the relevance and truth of many of those facts.

A society filled with people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines.

Ideologies that deny individual freedom and independence are welcomed with open arms.

When education becomes so degraded that young students are no longer taught to reason clearly, private citizens have the obligation rebuild that system so the great contribution to Western civilization—logic—is reinstated in its rightful place.

Logic, the key by which true political discourse, science, and law were, in fact, originally developed, must be unearthed.

Logic and reasoning, the capacity to think, the ability to analyze ideas—an ability which has been forgotten, which has been a surpassing virtue in every free civilization—must be restored.

Once a vital thing has been misplaced, buried, and covered over by mindless substitutions, people cannot immediately recognize the original thing has any importance, meaning, or existence.

To declare its importance makes no sense to “the crowd.” They look bewildered and shake their heads. They search their memories and find nothing.

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Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance

October 1, 2016

Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance

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Photo by new 1lluminati | CC BY 2.0

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an “economics of contempt” that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]

The forces normalizing and contributing to such violence are too expansive to cite, but surely they would include: the absurdity of celebrity culture; the blight of rampant consumerism; state-legitimated pedagogies of repression that kill the imagination of students; a culture of immediacy in which accelerated time leaves no room for reflection; the reduction of education to training; the transformation of mainstream media into a mix of advertisements, propaganda, and entertainment;

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Defeat is Victory

January 19, 2016

Defeat is Victory

John Holcroft

On the wall of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth from his novel 1984 there were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It occurred to me that these apply just a little bit too well to the way the Washington, DC establishment operates.

War certainly is peace: just look at how peaceful Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine have become thanks to their peacemaking efforts. The only departures from absolute peacefulness which might be taking place there have to do with the fact that there are some people still alive there. This should resolve itself on its own, especially in the Ukraine, where the people now face the prospect of surviving a cold winter without heat or electricity.

Freedom is indeed slavery: to enjoy their “freedom,” Americans spend most of their lives working off debt, be it a mortgage, medical debt incurred due to an illness, or student loans. Alternatively, they can also enjoy it by rotting in jail. They also work longer hours with less time off and worse benefits than in any other developed country, and their wages haven’t increased in two generations.

And what keeps it all happening is the fact that ignorance is indeed strength; if it wasn’t for the Americans’ overwhelming, willful ignorance of both their own affairs and the world at large, they would have rebelled by now, and the whole house of cards would have come tumbling down.

But there is a fourth slogan they need to add to the wall of Washington’s Ministry of Truth. It is this:

DEFEAT IS VICTORY

The preposterous nature of the first three slogans can be finessed away in various ways.

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The American Media: Pandering to Bias and Ignorance

December 21, 2015

The American Media: Pandering to Bias and Ignorance

anderson-cooper-attack-video1

The Texas board of education didn’t find anything wrong with a world geography textbook that said slaves from Africa were workers, but that immigrants from northern Europe were indentured servants.

This is the same school board that five years ago demanded that textbooks emphasize that slavery was only a side issue to the cause of the civil war, and that Republican achievements be emphasized in political science and civics textbooks.

For good measure, the officials also wanted a “fair and balanced” look at evolution versus intelligent design or creationism, and that global warming is only a theory, overlooking substantial and significant scientific evidence.

Because Texas adopts textbooks for the entire state, and there is minimal local choice, publishers tend to publish what Texas wants. The geography book had a 100,000 sale in Texas alone. However, McGraw-Hill, under a firestorm of protest from educators and parents, is modifying the text—African slaves will no longer be “workers” but slaves in the next printing.

Publishers in America, trying to reap the widest possible financial benefit by not offending anyone, especially school boards, often force authors to overlook significant historical and social trends. For more than a century, books which targeted buyers in the North consistently overlooked or minimized Southern views about the Civil War; other books, which targeted a Southern readership, discussed the War of Northern Aggression or the War Between the States.

Almost all media overlooked significant issues about slavery, the genocide against Native Americans, the real reasons for the Mexican-American War, the seizure of personal property and subsequent incarceration of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, the reasons why the United States went to war in Vietnam, the first Gulf War and, more recent, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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False East/West Paradigm And The End Of Freedom

October 14, 2015

False East/West Paradigm And The End Of Freedom

People are desperate for leaders and heroes. This is an undeniable condition of human life and of human civilization. Some historians and social observers, however, seem to think it is enough to simply point out this condition and pretend as if they have made some grand declaration; as if they have come to the root of the problem of mankind. In their laziness, they have mistaken a symptom for the cause.

Why do people so often demand leaders and heroic figures? What drives the institutionalization of hierarchy, celebrity and geopolitical idolization? I believe this condition is caused by three factors – fear, ignorance, and apathy.

This is not to say that there are not people throughout history that are worth looking up to, or that looking up to a particular hero figure is wrong. Heroes and sometimes leaders can act as points of reference, helping us to aspire to greater personal accomplishment and extraordinary achievement. The problem is many historical figures labeled heroic are in fact monsters in masks paraded as saviors by history writers with agendas. Real heroes (in the past hundred years in particular) are most often unsung, and remain little known.

This is why the idolization of puppet leaders is so disturbing to those of us in the Liberty Movement. We witnessed the blind militancy of the so-called “right wing” in the support of George W. Bush after 9/11, only to be led into quagmire, economic despair, and a surveillance state based on numerous lies. We then had to witness the insane cult-like fervor of the so-called “left wing” as Barack Obama took office, only to continue and accelerate the same draconian policies of the Bush Administration while conjuring new methods for the division and destruction of American society and prosperity.

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You Will Soon Lose Everything You Own Unless You Act Now!

September 27, 2015

Have you ever sat in a room and couldn’t figure out why people were laughing? They laughed and laughed and laughed as your curiosity grew and grew. And then, suddenly, you realized they were laughing at you! This is what is happening to all Americans. We have been robbed blind and we have scarcely noticed. Now, our very existence is being threatened and people laugh at you for talking about it as they call you a “conspiracy theorist”, “fear-monger” and “the purveyor of doom and gloom”.

I was roundly criticized when I said the Cyprus bail-in scenario was coming to the United States. I was told there would be a revolution if this happened and the government would be too afraid to try such a thing and that we would have 100 million Americans in the street who would be heavily armed.

Listening to these sheep is like listening to a country song played backwards. You know  the song where the wife does not leave, the truck still runs and the cowboy stops drinking. Maybe it is all the fluoride in the water that is causing such widespread ignorance and apathy.

The globalists are preparing to steal everything you own, they have rehearsed for this day, they are on a timetable to carry this plot out and they are laughing at our collective stupidity!

The Beta Tests for the “Grand Theft of the American People” Are Complete

The American people have been through several beta tests related to our private wealth being confiscated and no resistance was offered by the sheep of this country.

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“Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored”

April 10, 2015

“Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored”

Courage

“The kid had a 94-mile-per-hour fastball, a clean delivery, and a body that looked as if it had been created to wear a baseball uniform. He was, in short, precisely the kind of pitcher Billy thought he had trained his scouting department to avoid.”

– Michael Lewis, Moneyball

In his book Moneyball, Michael Lewis explores the irrationality and ignorance of human behavior and the opportunities it creates for those willing to resist it. The book represents a value investors guide to how the Oakland A’s, with one of the smallest budgets in Major League Baseball, consistently found and acquired quality players that were shunned under the traditional scouting matrix. These overlooked and undervalued players afforded the Oakland A’s and General Manager Billy Beane the fifth best winning percentage with the fourth lowest total payroll over the last 15 years. As the graph below from FiveThirtyEight shows, Beane dramatically outperformed his opponents when it came to maximizing the value of his budget.

Once when asked why he was willing to allow Michael Lewis to write a book about his approach, Beane responded “It won’t matter who reads it, no one would have the courage to put into practice what we do.” This same model of logic and courage should be applied in investing.

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Are Americans Ignorant or victims of Yellow Journalism? | Armstrong Economics

October 31, 2014

Are Americans Ignorant or victims of Yellow Journalism? | Armstrong Economics.

Reuters has published the result of what is being touted as the Ignorance Index. The one question as an example: “Guess how many U.S. girls aged 15-19 give birth each year. Go ahead, guess. If you calculated the number at 3 percent you’re correct; if you guessed 24 percent, you’re American.”

I rarely watch TV. If I do, it tends to be national news – never local news who seem to think a burning house is news or some guy shot his wife in a domestic dispute. I was at dinner and the TV was on. I could not believe the TV advertisements for the elections. They are allNEGATIVE calling the other a liar or misrepresenting the facts on everything. One said the candidate cut the number of police, made the streets more dangerous and then shows a picture of ISIS and then said she raise taxes. Then the very next advertisement flips and calls the other a liar for something or another. There was ZERO advertisement about anything other than vote for me because I lie less that the other liar.

It seems that the Ignorant Index may be more tied to the bias and lack of integrity of the media. They focus on sensationalism to gain readership and in the process focus of one thing and create false images in the minds of the average person.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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