MC’s latest essay concerns the culture of lies that pervades the 21st-century West, and the political, moral, and spiritual pollution that afflicts us because of it.
Unlearning
by MC
Ignorance is never bliss, and is extremely dangerous to life and limb. But what of propaganda? What of lies believed, and never unlearned?
I have just been reading an article about the BBC, and their treatment of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, where the BBC implied that Florence Nightingale was a racist. History makes no such claim, and what is more, provides no evidence that the two ever exchanged any dialogue. But the story makes for good political copy:
The attitude to Nightingale is a mystery. A woman who spent her whole life after the Crimean war taking on the war office and reactionary men in government in order to improve conditions for the average British soldier, should be a hero of the Left, and of feminists. Instead she has been vilified, because she came from a wealthy background and became a Victorian establishment figure, and because she had a brief meeting with a woman from the Caribbean.
Of course this situation says nothing about the two women or their real worth but everything about the strange ideology of the left in the UK today, skewed with envy and hatred but also sunk in historical ignorance, unable to fathom the ideas and behaviour of our ancestors, imaginatively or through facts.
It is these same lying leftists who have been in charge of our children’s ‘education’ for decades. It struck me how difficult a situation one is in when one is not just ‘ignorant’ but has had one’s mind filled with arrant garbage. Garbage disposal is never easy.
When one reads widely, both non-fiction and good (honest) fiction, one gets a feel for truth, and one can compare what one has been taught against what one reads. But this is a rare skill, no longer encouraged and is thus not generally the case, and a historical textbook is ‘lucky’ if it sells more than 6,000 copies in the UK.
Most graduates do not read textbooks once they have finished their finals. And to get a good degree one must regurgitate only that which is politically educationally correct in order to appease the liars.
So the propaganda sticks, and eventually becomes mainstream as the affected individuals attain positions where their unwitting tendentiousness is uncorrected.
When I was lied to as a child, often by well-intentioned parents, there were usually consequences, mostly embarrassing, but sometimes potentially life-changing.
As one of four boys, I did not know what the physical difference was between girls and boys, so, as one does, I asked my mother, she told me that girls have ‘nothing’ there. At the age of eight I knew she was lying, because the girls at school teased me and dropped hints and allusions that I could not understand.
Eventually, as a young teenager, I persuaded a younger female cousin to assuage my curiosity, but had this gone wrong, I could have been liable for prosecution and lifelong disgrace (she was about 9-10 at the time).
In the fifties and sixties, school in UK was apolitical, and one was encouraged to seek ‘truth’ by looking at a situation from as many angles as possible. So I was taught creation myth and Darwinian myth at the same time, and told that there was no proof for either, and that I could form my own opinions.
Also, we did not study other religions, and history stopped at Corn Laws (1850s). If one wanted to know more, then read the books for one’s self. So I did.
There is an inseparable bond between truth and liberty, and by default, between lies and tyranny. Why would we want to teach lies to all and sundry when it is the truth that sets us free? We tell lies when we need people to do as we want them to, not as they want to do for themselves. Why did Barack Hussein Obama tell us that we could keep our own doctors? Because to him in his personal belief, the lies were justified by the perceived need for Obamacare. The ends justified the means.
Revolutionary change is not difficult to kick off, but is very difficult to steer, and almost impossible to stop until it runs out of steam. It is this indirection that means that the best laid revolutionary plans tend to come off the rails and become uncontrollable. We look at history: the Girondists, the theorists of the French revolution, found themselves mounting the steps of their guillotine when the violence-oriented Montagnards seized power and precipitated the Terror. We find the Mensheviks giving way to the extremist Bolsheviks and then the takeover of the Stalinists.
All the while the people, in whose name these things were done, continued to starve and live in squalor; politicians and their ‘hope and change’ peccadilloes are not conducive to growing and transporting of food. Land management is a highly skilled job, and when Mugabe in Zimbabwe displaced the (white) land managers it was a sentence of death by starvation for many thousands of people.
The food supply has always been the bête noire of revolutions, and is usually the reason that revolutionaries resort to slavery and mass murder as food supplies dwindle. The ends justify the means, as always.
So now we see our governments lying to us about food supplies; manmade droughts in California and poisonous GMOs. We are naïve if we think that the toxic side effects of such things are not known by governments. Why would our governments want to poison us?
Government of the people by the people for the people has become a rather sick joke, and the politicians’ oaths to ‘uphold the Constitution’ set no example to other more petty officials who abuse their oaths day in, day out.
Once we as a society accommodate the lies, they are here to stay. They become part of learned behaviour, and are thus difficult to unlearn. Unlearning is difficult and painful. Do vaccines really work as described? Can I give up cornflakes because the makers have done a deal with Monsanto? Can I stop voting for Democrats (or Republicans) as I have always done? Can I come to terms with the truth of National Socialism being a phenomenon of the Left? That Israel is a legal entity and ‘Palestine’ is a vicious exercise in Taqiyya?
That Islam is a “religion of peace”?
There was a time in our history when lies were unacceptable. Now they are part of the excrement of life, amongst which we have to pick a slippery and nauseating path. Once more those above us empty their chamber pot of lies from the heights, but now there is no “gardy-lie” to warn us.
Only I can guard myself against the lies. Before I believe, I must research, look for the truth, and unlearn those lies with which I have been spoon-fed from a tender age.
My mother lied to me because, in the ’50s, any discussion of sexuality, even with one’s own son, was taboo. But in this, the 21st century, many more issues are taboo too, so the lies just keep spewing from the heights, coating us with a layer of verbal excrescence from which we can only cleanse ourselves. Failure to so do means that we invade the area around us with the all-pervasive stench of mendacity.
One of the speakers slated for the Vatican rollout of the long-awaited Papal document on climate change once said the earth is overpopulated by at least 6 billion people.
The teaching document, called an encyclical, is scheduled for release on June 18 at Vatican City. Perhaps with the exception of the 1968 encyclical on contraception, no Vatican document has been greeted with such anticipation.
The political left is hoping for a document that ties belief in global warming to a religious obligation. Climate skeptics have already started criticizing the document.
Compare the above with this:
- “Prepare especially the most vulnerable 3 billion people to adapt to the climate changes, both chronic and abrupt, that society will be unable to mitigate.”
- The Catholic church and other religious leaders mobilize public opinion and public funds to meet the poorest 3 billion people’s energy needs, and to raise their incomes, education, healthcare and quality of life.
Believe it or not these statements are about the same issue, one sees the coming papal encyclical as endorsing a massive reduction in population, and the other sees it in terms of a massive redistribution of (your) wealth. The truth is that there is no hard evidence that climate (as opposed to weather) has changed in any significant way for many thousands of years, and that what we have here is a socialist/communist political agenda gift-wrapped in terror-depicting paper.
It is difficult for me as one who majored in Chemical Engineering to swallow the ‘science’ that is supposedly behind the ‘Climate Change’ panic. If the Pope believes in God, then he should not be trying to push humanist political solutions, and if it is about redistribution of wealth, then a Pope does not have to attach it to what appears to many people as a cynical hoax.
I would prefer to see the Pope speak out about Muslim annihilation of Christians in the Middle East, but that is not ‘trendy’ enough. The previous Pope tried to expose the lie of the religion of peace, and he suffered for it.
Readers of this site grapple with truth. If they did not, they would be among those who would have the site banned and its nobility beheaded. It is truth that sets us free, and by implication, lies are the chains of our bondage.
Unlearning the lies so that we can recognise the truths is the hardest to learn of all intellectual exercises. However, with practice there comes a time when we become adept, and truth shines out as a beacon wherever it is to be found.
MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.
Kant told us that we can never find out what the “noumena” is [the reality that is actually out there, objective and not subjective] because we can never avoid the censorship of our sense organs. We can never know what existence and truth “out there” really is because we are forever locked behind our peripheral nervous system and its notorious deceptions and illusions. We could, in fact, be brains in a vat. We can never be sure.
From this, the post-modernists tell us that this means there is no firm truth, no absolute values of cultures or ideas or principles. Everything is a mush of relative nihilism. No one knows anything.
And the academics all over the world bought it because they each wanted to be celebrity and different and special.
I think we can re-argue this with some different philosophical postulates and win this time, but meanwhile the common man is going to have to start shoving reality harshly against some of their opposing point guards, perhaps so roughly that they begin to disappear and leave the game.
Well, anyway, we are all gradually ascending the learning curve…the cuckoos around us are beginning to come into focus and the urge to re-enter a normal world getting stronger and stronger.
The po-mo folks had a veritable dream team of intellectuals to use in their relativization of everything. Combining Freud and Einstein and the nihilism of Nietzsche in order to bring about the euthanasia of “god” provided the perfect slippery slope for any villainy they could concoct.
Yes, re those academics aching for fame. And yes again for the increasing urge of ordinary people to live in a normal world.
No Kant said that we live in an objective Greater Manifold Reality. He split oor personal observations into “categories”. He also talked about the “Moral Imperative” and Kant was not saying we are incapable of grasping Reality but that our own subjective impressions form our world view. This is very different from Relativism.
The very act of our attempting to grasp reality makes it impossible for us to grasp reality.
Yes, we affect what we observe (a la Heisenberg). But that doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, keep us from discerning that which we *are* trying to grasp.
The “bottom line” is to find out who (or what) is observing. Because we don’t know what it is we are trying to “grasp” (or discern what it is we want to grasp) we must back away from all attempts at grasping. This could be considered a “negative approach,” but not in the commonly supposed undesirable sense.
The “post modernists” are, of course, clueless. There is an Absolute, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with cultures, ideas or principles.
Unlearning the lies so that we can recognise the truths is the hardest to learn of all intellectual exercises.
———————
When I unlearned my kamikaze socialist beliefs, the experience of conversion (because that’s what it was) came from seeing first-hand the horrible results of benign intentions behind which lay theories about how people acted. The theories turned out to be more dreadfully wrong and harmful than the “scientific” theory that the sun revolved around the earth, so shut up about it.
That’s the general Leftist comeback to any suggestion their theories about human behavior might be wrong. It’s the explanation of “SHUT UP” (…or you’ll be sorry).
As best I remember the beginning of the end of my socialist leanings was via economics. I was already on the road out of Lotus Land from my years of working with battered women and writing about the fact that these women were not necessarily passive victims. Not that they “deserved” the abuse, but that repeated experience of the abuse were discrete instances; no one caught in the drama seemed able to see the patterns or the rhythms – the template.
Once a woman could see the template in the linked experiences, she changed. And when *she* changed often the dynamic did also. It wasn’t uncommon for the abuse to simply cease without there ever being a discussion about it. However, that disequilibrium made the couple ask one another: what now?
But a culture is not a dyad. The lies are a top-down phenomenon and serve to preserve the prerequisites of power. People are willing to believe easy answers because they ‘seem’ right and it’s too scary to go off on your own searching for answers that may estrange you from the larger group. Those who swallowed the “if you want to keep your doctor, you can” did not want to face the alternative messy situation. Thus, the decision to let the government figure it out; I can’t make any difference anyway.
Lies are easy and addictive and security-enhancing. If I believe that what I’m spoon-fed is the truth because it’s an easy out, it’s akin to being a diabetic who faithfully follows the American Diabetic Association’s dietary guidelines. Following their rules does not have a happy ending but it’s so much easier to believe the doctors than it is to do your own research.
– I hear that more than any other excuse.
Lies are easy and addictive, yes. But they can only provide a false sense of security.
do your own research
This is exactly along the lines that I wanted to make a point of.
I think, the best we can do, is to encourage people, young and old, to make their own research, take a step back, and analyze critically whatever comes their way presented as a given truth.
We all know how ‘enjoyable’ it was to do the homework we were assigned. However, we all must admit how we have profited from the exercise. The same can be said here, turn off the tube that preaches convenience and having it your way and do the needed homework to ascertain the truth of the matter.
We all know who the Father of Lies is, and how he has enlisted an army of useful idiots to preach his word. YA help you if you disagree with them as nowadays something bad will happen to you and they will see to it in all their religious ardor. It is written, “By their fruits you shall know them.” I have been cataloging the ‘fruit’ that they have borne for the past 25 years. My nose won’t let me near it and my stomach has already warned me of the consequences.
I know the Truth and he has set me free and I prefer this to anything else that is out there, thank you. The rest of it is simply a pack of lies that is shuffled occasionally to make it seem as though we are dealing from a fresh deck. We aren’t, as it has also been written, “There is nothing this is new under the sun,” including today’s events.
I find British (BBC) propaganda outright dangerous. People often forget that it weren’t the Germans during both World Wars who were masters of propaganda, but Britain.
The BBC has a world reputation in making high quality documentaries. In which they ALWAYS add a little bit of multicultural propaganda. I just watched a fairly decent docu about Pontius Pilate. Guess what his no.2 was. Don’t. It was a black man from Southern Africa. That’s almost the same as Pilate wearing glasses, a wristwatch and an Ipad. A true historical anachronism. But politically very correct.
Same for another docu about Hadrian’s Wall. You see a contubernium (basic squad of 8 men) with … half of them being black. Jet black, mind you. Not ‘from North Africa colored’, but ‘from way down south of the Sudan colored’. Yes, there were Syrian archers stationed on Hadrian’s Wall. Some married and died there. However, they were relatively exceptions.
Accurate history is what bind us to our roots. Cut that off, and you don’t have much to fight for. Be it with arms, of with labor. Same for patriotism. Today patriotism is seen as highly incorrect. The Argentinean queen of The Netherlands even went as far as to say, publicly, that Dutch culture does not exist.
The problem is that most cultures are not as tolerant and understanding as we perceive us to be. Mr. Putin is working hard to re-establish the Iron Curtain. Caliph to be Erdogan does something similar with the Ottoman empire. Muslims in Europe openly shout they will owe the continent soon, and enslave the Europeans.
Both are vile figures, no matter who you support. And here we see the multicul propaganda effect: people don’t see them as dangerous anymore. We can negotiate everything. Compromises are always possible. Why die for Europe? It’s just a geographical spot on the map.
And what about Danny Boyle’s black engineers, who apparently worked with Brunel, as seen in the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games?
Patriotism is a sin
or something
The new European ideology Tolerance
No more free speech
Gatestone
“Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has accepted an invitation to become chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR). The ECTR boasts an advisory board comprising a dozen European presidents and prime ministers.
It describes itself as a non-governmental body that “fosters understanding and tolerance among peoples of various ethnic origin; educates on techniques of reconciliation; facilitates post-conflict social apprehensions; monitors chauvinistic behaviours, proposes protolerance initiatives and legal solutions.”
Legal solutions…as in anything which is not according to the “understanding and tolerance” will be brought to court.
Public broadcasting Promotion of Tolerance
“The Government shall ensure,” the ECTR advocates, “that public broadcasting (television and radio) stations will devote a prescribed percentage of their programmes to promoting a climate of tolerance.”
This is what the BBC, for one, has been doing over the last years. BBC used to be all about quality. Now it has become a tool for Tolerance.
“A separate governmental body will also be set up to “supervise the implementation” of the Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance”
You can’t make this up. Well, George Orwell wrote “1984” way back. This is 2015. And we are living it.
“The Argentinean queen of The Netherlands even went as far as to say, publicly, that Dutch culture does not exist.”
That is what elite representatives in country after country in Europe keep telling the original peoples of those countries. The message being that forget your culture and your history. Now, learn all about the new ideology of Tolerance and no free speech.
Just for the record this is not what the queen said.
During a speech in 2007 she said;
‘De Nederlander’ bestaat niet.
(emphasis on ‘de Nederlander’)
Meaning; The typical Dutchman does not exists.
Thanks very much for that snippet. That is quite something for a queen to say to her subjects. The drive to dismantle European nation states is becoming pretty open about things, isn’t it?
I think the original writer was thinking of Mona Sahlin in Sweden who said that Sweden has no native culture (“just midsummer night and lame stuff like that”)
“Most graduates do not read textbooks once they have finished their finals. ”
I have a relative with a doctorate in historiography. She has never read anything other than a “historical novel” since she got her degree. She loves to use the title “Dr.” though.
Another relative had just finished a post-graduate degree in International Relations. A year or so later, she came back from holiday in a foreign country. I didn’t recognise the name of the island where she’d stayed, and asked her what country it belonged to. She. Did. Not. Know. She had flown maybe 1000 miles and spent a week or two there, and it never crossed her mind “what country am I in”. I asked her what language they spoke. She didn’t know.
Both have degrees from “good” universities (among the top 30 in the UK). We really are descending into an Idiocracy. I gave up teaching in university back in the 1990s. It was clear to me way back then that degree-level education was going to the dogs. Students who could not write coherently were being given high marks (never mind whether or not the content of their writing was anything close to the curriculum).
It seems as though you can’t teach curiosity, at least by the time anyone gets to college. If anything, curiosity seems to be punished since it may expose the ignorance of a teacher. Worse though it might expose something controversial.
While I agree with you about education–indoctrination is the current method, and far-left social progressivism is the ideology–I’m puzzled by your attitude toward GMOs. Here I find Norman Borlaug, Pam Ronald, and Neal Carter convincing and Theirry Vrain much less so. Even Mark Lynas came to realize that his opposition to GMOs was primarily emotional. I suspect you found more concrete evidence that led to your position–would you mind sharing it? I looked through the archive of your articles, but I couldn’t find one whose title suggested a GMO theme.
To my mind, genetic modification is playing with fire, and the consequences could be catastrophic.
A little knowledge is dangerous, and since the discovery of DNA and its subsequent sequencing we have been allowed to make the assumption that the GMO industry is based on ‘Science’ not trial and error.
DNA controls what goes on inside a cell. Somehow, somewhere is a map that tells the cells how to sequence themselves to make up an organism. This set of data has not yet been discovered. We are ignorant of the higher processes in life.
If in meddling with DNA we disrupt this ‘placement map’ then we are going to end up with chimeras. I do not believe that this is a good thing.
We have grain that produces its own insecticides, but nobody knows at what point it stops producing insecticides in our bodies, now if something like dichlodiphenyltrichlochloroethane (DDT for short) this organochlorine. as the name implies is a human nerve poison which caused absolute mayhem in the environment for a hundred years before its connection with Polio in children was established, let alone admitted to:
http://www.naturalnews.com/036290_polio_DDT_pesticide_exposure.html
So how can we trust anybody with GMOs:
http://foodintegritynow.org/2011/05/19/gmo-study-omg-you%E2%80%99re-eating-insecticide/
I begin to see where we divide. I’m with Orac on this one:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/09/23/mark-blaxill-and-dan-olmsted-polio/
Still, “lif is læne: eal scæceð leoht and lif somod,” as the great Tolkien remarked–and it is a great wisdom not to waste what light remains on unnecessary quarrels.
Best wishes,
RS
You might like to read the paper here:
http://nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BSEM-2011.pdf
and consider just who is making a lot of money – not Wakefield, who was not struck off for his research, but because he took some samples in a way that the GMC deemed unethical, but the High Court subsequently found was not….
I read a lot of the paper carefully.
The paper itself presents some problems. Is it meant to be a scientific paper, or a Grand Jury brief? Is it peer-reviewed? I like the paper, but if you’re going to be rigorous, you have to apply rigorous criteria to all your evidence and reviews.
Having said that, the paper makes a pretty good case that the members of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) ought to be investigated for medical malpractice and criminal malfeasance. They undoubtedly covered up any evidence of vaccine dangers, and misrepresented the safety of their recommended vaccine regimen to parents.
However, much of the problem was associated with a particular variant of vaccine. While the JCVI doctored reports and statistics, the health services of Japan, Canada, and Scotland, as reported, simply went back to the older vaccine and eliminated that problem.
The JCVI wasn’t responding to money either. They requested that the manufacturers doctor their data sheets, but it was the manufacturers themselves who pulled the dangerous vaccine from the market. More than likely, the JCVI was suffering from a severe and advanced case of cognitive sclerosis, making them unwilling to consider or publicize any data which went against their preconceived notions of indiscriminate, universal vaccinations at all costs.
There was some mention of a correlation between polio and the live polio vaccine, but absolutely nothing on any effect of DDT or the mercury preservative thimerosal, which was pretty much discontinued in 2001 anyway.
There was some mention of a relationship between measles vaccination and autism, but the focus was on the immunological process initiated by the vaccine itself: nothing to do with DDT or thimerosal.
Apparently, Wakefield made a contribution to the study of vaccine effects, but his findings only comprised a very small part of the evidence discussed by the paper.
In sum, the British oversight committee, JCVI, seems to have been particularly unethical, if not criminal. No parent or medical health professional should put the slightest credence in their findings or recommendations. Nevertheless, the paper does not make a blanket statement against vaccination effectiveness. However, vaccinations should be evaluated in light of scientific findings. For example, the paper suggests that it might actually be better if no measles vaccines at all were given to children.
Ramspace,
Thanks for turning me on to Orec. I follow the truth, and the scientific method, wherever it leads.
Lies, enough lies over enough time, lead to catastrophe. Which is to say that though you cannot combat the lies, reality will. We are heading for economic implosion. What will come out of that is anybody’s guess. But one thing is certain, it will shatter the world (dis)order we presently live under. And may provide a space, a clearing in the wreckage if you will, where liberty and reason can breathe again.
Pushing the interest rates towards 0, while preparing for sharia finance, are they? Sharia finance, and all that goes with it.
Thanks for your article, MC. As a professional swindler of the young–oops, American public high school social studies teacher–I am often disgusted by the narrative I find in the textbooks and curriculum I am given. Worse, had I not been an avid reader since my very young years, I’d probably be just as swindled by the narrative as my colleagues tend to be.
Whatever the cause of the day, the purveyors of lies will latch onto someone to turn into a hero. A good example is how students at my school were shown a laudatory film of the despicable Harvey Milk, who preyed on teenaged runaway boys in Dan Francisco back in the day!
Excellent essay MC. Most of the points I would have made have been made above by others. Just one thing, the BBC. Over here in Thailand, the BBC world service is one of my main contacts with the UK – I keep it on in the background while reading GoV, Brussels Journal etc. I am appalled by its blatant hard left slant and by the contempt with which it treats people who call them on it. Their staff must all have PhDs in mendacity.
On the subject of Mary Seacole, like most people my age, like you, I was fortunate to undergo a sensible non -Marxist education (we might even have attended the same school) which never mentioned Florence Nightingale when covering the Crimean war, never mind Mary Seacole. I was made aware of the latter only a few years ago during a “Black History Month” event at the London Borough of Camden. They were trying to say that most of what Florence Nightingale had done was actually done by Mary Seacole. Well, they would, wouldn’t they.