A while back, I wrote an answer on Quora to the following question:
How can someone lie to themselves and believe it wholeheartedly, even though it's obviously not true at all?
However, by the time I went to post it, the question had been deleted.
I’m glad, because this needs more exposure than a Quora answer will ever get.
How do people – including intelligent, educated, apparently responsible people – get themselves to believe the most ludicrous, irrational, unfounded garbage, completely clueless of their own idiocy?
Here’s a diagram of how it goes:
We’re talking about people who have been traumatized and terrorized in all kinds of ways, whose sense of powerlessness has pushed them to retreat away from the realities they feel they’re helpless against, until they finally break away from reality itself.
I know such people. A lot of them, actually. They are supremely confident, but their kind of confidence has a completely different feel to it than the confidence of competent, realistic people.
Competent people aren’t detached from what’s really going on, but intimately familiar with it and connected to it. They don’t need to resort to hysterical beliefs to know that the dang thing’s gonna work, because they know how to make the dang thing work. And they know, by virtue of having figured out how to make other dang things work, that when confronted with a dang thing they don’t have a clue about, they can figure out how to make that dang thing work, too.
A key tell is that competent people are not afraid of uncertainty and doubt. Their confidence is solid enough to face uncertainty and doubt honestly, explore them, and resolve them.
People in LaLa Land don’t get their confidence from resolving uncertainty and doubt with understanding. They get it from eradicating uncertainty and doubt, which amounts to a refusal to get understanding. Instead of embracing the truth, they do violence. And, as is true of everyone who decides to go the way of violence, it doesn’t much matter to them how they do it.
Religious people are a great example of this. If they had real faith, enduring faith, then why would they need to assemble – the more the merrier – to create a sense of community and engage in a bunch of Rah-Rah! to get recharged and pumped up one, two, three times a week or more in order to operate confidently? Obviously, it didn’t stick long. It doesn’t stick because they don’t internalize these incessant confidence infusions organically. The only way to do that is by the intimate familiarity of understanding, which we can only obtain by intimate interaction with what’s really going on — which is precisely what they’re desperate to avoid.
In other words, although real faith starts by hearing, it doesn’t arrive until we’ve worked with and become experienced with whatever it is that we need confidence for.
As one writer put it so famously, “faith without works is dead.”
And so, without real faith that’s alive, vibrant and formidable, since they refuse to engage with the dang thing that scares them so much that they never get close enough to understand and become competent with it, they need a substitute that keeps them insulated from it. It’s a lot like zombies that keep dying and need resurrection over and over again.
Maybe that’s why, as you watch them go through their routine, doctrinaire, dogmatic, carrot-and-stick guilt-tripping faith “encouragement” sessions, undergoing pseudo-faith implantation, they literally wear the expressions of passive, servile zombies. Just watch them. It’s enlightening.
Any faith that comes from narrative (hearing) alone is dead faith, not real faith. That’s why religious services feel dead and need lots of visual and auditory novelty and, in the last half century, plain old entertainment to liven them up. No love of the truth there, because when you get together with your beloved, you feel exhilarated. You don’t need a great band, spectacular sound system, visual effects, and striking stories in rousing oratory from some guy you really don’t know from Donald to get your courage up.
Religious people don’t get anything genuine, robust, and enduring from their interminable “services”. They get repeated shots of hope and enthusiasm that fall apart if ever-so-slightly challenged and, otherwise, quickly wear off and need replenishing pronto. A week is not a very long time for “the Truth” to endure, you know.
So, the “laws” they’re so keen about – “divine” or “natural” or “universal”, it’s all the same – have not been put into their hearts and written on their minds. In other words, they have not embraced the truth and internalized it so that it’s fused to and into them. They have not assimilated and “become one” with the ideas that they so eagerly preach and try to convince others about.
And you can hear it plainly in the way they talk about it. Truth and faith and God and love and goodness and all the rest are things they feel separated from. They feel they need to regain and be reunited with them. These are things that they need to “come to” and “lay hold of” and “hold onto” and “be faithful to” — but, because their hands quickly grow tired and their attractions and attachments drive their longings astray, they soon need another jab. And another. And another.
To LaLa Land people, uncertainty and doubt are of the devil. They’re scared to death of the unknown. Anything that isn’t “of faith” — a pseudo-faith defined and controlled by their indoctrinators and authorities — is taboo, sin, evil, anathema. You can see this dramatically by merely raising questions that remind them of the doubts and uncertainties they’re fleeing from. They can’t be disagreed with or contradicted if they won’t even allow their “faith” to be questioned, right?
But this isn’t faith at all. It’s not an organic, genuine confidence.
It’s self-delusion.
Competent people don’t react like this to questions that raise uncertainties and doubts which undermine their confidence. In fact, they react in a starkly opposite way. They don’t rebuff and fight questions off – they enjoy them. They don’t regard uncertainties and doubts as enemies – they enjoy exploring them, because doing so is exactly what has made them competent to this point, and they welcome the opportunity to grow into even more.
There is, in fact, a genuine faith that has nothing to do with retreating from incompetence into the hysterical. The faith of competence might look like it sits smack dab next to the pseudo-faith of the hysterical, but just like competence sits smack dab next to LaLa Land in the diagram, they’re nowhere near each other and nothing alike. The distance to get from one to the other is as great as the distance to get from one edge to the other of a thousand-yards-deep, hundred-miles-long crevasse – even though there’s only 50 yards of space between them.
Pseudo-faith says, “I can’t, no one can, unless…” and whips out its litany of defeatist conditions and excuses, then retreats to its chosen “brotherhood” of defeatists to pump each other up for courage to tolerate being stuck where they in no wise want to stay.
Faith says, “I can look for or create a way out which I can’t even describe yet,” and sets to work to find or create it.
You can feel the difference.
The confidence of competent people is solid, grounded, tightly connected to what’s really going on. In LaLa Land, they gain confidence by abandoning the very things that make the competent confident and cling instead to hysterical bullshit someone dreamed up in their head.
So, what does all this have to do with ReLOVEution?
Everything.
We will create a new, radically different world in exactly the same way that an innovator creates a breakthrough invention. There’s no magic here, unless you call it “magic” to break the grip of deeply inculcated, cannot-do, it’s-impossible baloney – but I get it. I know for myself that, when you break the grip that the ancients called unbelief, it feels like magic happened.
If you had lived in the time when people were afraid that trains could make women’s uteruses fly out of their bodies, you might well have had to brave a lot of ridicule and animosity in order to pursue a locomotive capable of exceeding 50 MPH. The first steamboat was dubbed “Fulton’s Folly”. Arguably one of the best land purchase deals in the history of the United States, at a measly two cents per acre, was ridiculed as “Seward’s Folly”.
No one fears or ridicules them now.
Lesson: if you imagine a profoundly better anything, be prepared for lots of resistance, even opposition and antagonism from people too freaked out to risk imagining anything of much value at all.
One cultural anthropologist, the director of Intel Corporation's Interaction and Experience Research, explained why some innovations are dreaded and disparaged more than others.
Cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell explained to the Wall Street Journal TECH site [WSJ article here] that extreme, fearful reactions to new technology are age old, and have even picked up speed alongside our rate of innovation. Critics of early steam-spewing locomotives, for example, thought “that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour,” and worried that “[female passengers’] uteruses would fly out of [their] bodies as they were accelerated to that speed”—which, for the record, they did and will not.* Others suspected that any human body might simply melt at high speeds.
Bell attributes this kind of reaction in part to the “moral panic” that a society experiences when particularly revelatory technological advances show up—specifically, ones which interfere with or alter our relationships with time, space, and each other:
“Cars? Clearly the same. Television? Absolutely. The Internet? Yes. Mobile phones? Yes. Fountain pens? Not so much. They may have changed our relationships to other people, but they didn’t really change our relationships to time and space.”
This society-wide panic often (unfairly) dotes on the threats an innovation might pose to women and children, and it didn’t end when we got over our locomotive fears. As automobiles gained traction in the early 1900s, they were seen by many as noisy, erratic “devil wagons” that women—thought to be prone to fainting, physical weakness, and out-of-the-blue bouts of hysteria—wouldn’t be able to control by themselves and shouldn’t be allowed to drive.
– “Early Trains Were Thought to Make Women’s Uteruses Fly Out”
Can you feel it, the hysteria involved in thinking like that?
That is exactly the same kind of hysteria I’ve been confronted with again and again over the last 15 years when I talk seriously and realistically about a truly new world.
“That’s naïve, Utopian, unrealistic, perfect-world, pie-in-the-sky nonsense – and it’s dangerous if people take it seriously!” pretty much captures the reaction.
It used to frost me – but now, having thoroughly examined it, I just laugh.
Those are the words of fools – in the Biblical sense – void of understanding.
Shutdowns like that weren’t products of cogent thinking, nor were they intended to be.
Naysaying is intended to be taken as if it’s smart, practical, “realistic” – of course – but the true intent is to shut down cogent thinking and intelligent discussion. Bowl after bowl of thought-terminating cliché salad, all of it completely reactionary and indoctrinated, not reasoned.
Frankly and bluntly, it’s hysterical.
I have dealt with naysayers for decades, over and over, smugly flattering themselves so smart while thinking and behaving and arguing exactly like rabid cultists do. That’s not a slam. That’s a long, consistent series of personal observations from intense interactions with both cynics and cultists.
Not once did anyone who dismissed the possibility of a radically new world produce reasonable, considered cause to dismiss it. Lots of can’t-do bleating, little wool. Not a single time. No wool, actually, but every bit as “tangible” as the Emperor’s new clothes. Instead, every time, they eventually lapsed into regurgitating dogmas they considered to be unquestionable.
That, my friend, is cultism in a nutshell. Unquestionability is the Holy Grail of all cultists. (So, now you understand why I consider both philosophy and religion as we’ve known them as nothing more than elaborate, grandiose exercises in cultism.)
But them pigs don’t fly no more.
I question all dogmas, regardless and caustically — because if they were true, there would be no need to dogmatize those truths and indoctrinate people with them – like we, to our shame, still do to our children in both “church” and “school”. And by now, I’ve dealt with dogmatists enough to understand why they opt to dismiss what they in no way understand. It’s as if Christians who were taught to pray, “and lead us not into temptation,” instead beg and plead, “and lead us not into the need to confront our hysterical fears”.
At the point when a radical innovation occurs to someone as an idea, a mere possibility, the innovator has nothing to recommend it other than their own gut-felt but otherwise baseless certainty that it might work. Theirs is a hope to obtain or achieve something not yet seen, and it’s a faith that trying to create or find the unseen thing is well worth it. This is doubly true for people bent on being serial innovators – Thomas Edison comes to mind – hoping and believing that they can and will realize all kinds of as-yet-unseen and even unimaginable things which they haven’t dreamed up, yet.
After exploring an idea and gaining familiarity with it, (still no evidence of viability, no proof,) the innovator might abandon it or, unsure, put it on the “back burner to simmer”. But if they can see the unseen – that the idea is possible, plausible, doable, and might just be worthwhile – then go ahead: just try to stop them from pursuing it.
This is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This is real faith, uniquely distinct from pseudo-faith, because it immediately, automatically, irresistibly drives us into doing something instead of mounting excuse after excuse to avoid doing anything, especially when our infantile avoidance dons the guise of waiting for a “savior” that’s going to do it for us, some day, over the rainbow – God or hero or authority or miraculous principle or magical law or anyone/anything else, doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not us.
Every single person, ever, who effected real change, did it by faith. Every single advancement made by human beings began with this faith, not some knockoff, its reality realized by this faith and none other.
So, every single innovator spent their entire time, from inspiration to initial conception to eventual evidence and proof that it wasn’t poppycock, working by faith.
Show me a religious thinker or preacher who espouses that faith and I’ll eagerly listen to what they have to say.
So, the first step to ReLOVEution is to decide and commit absolutely to find ways to become assured of what we hope for — not by deluding ourselves, but by abandoning the gaslight narratives that keep this shithole world going – and by developing an intimate understanding of what’s really going on. This applies to obtaining anything we hope for, from pennies to pleasure to partners to prosperity to a “perfect world”. By this faith, we’ll get it. Without this faith, we won’t, unless accidentally – and then good luck trying to hold onto and sustain it.
The problem is: we were trained to think backwards as if we were slaves or subjects or servants. “Education” so-called has a single, basic, underlying purpose: to create servile mentalities. Worker mentalities. As if we were tools. Those being groomed for “power” get a completely different kind of education.
So far, we’ve accepted “our place”, stuck as we are – or, rather, feeling stuck as we do – in this fox-guarded hencoop, following pretty much every order barked at us.
So, instead of focusing on and pursuing what we hope for, we’ve been focused on evading what we’ve been made to fear. Instead of embracing a better world, let alone a wonderful world, we cling to better-than-worser (not a typo but rather representative of the level of “intelligence” we display when we’re servile) as if it’s as good as it gets.
Except, it never turns out to have been as good as it gets. As sure as the day you were born, one or another renegade always comes along, spurning all the dogmas and naysaying and “advice”, bucking all the apparent odds (except that the actual odds will prove to have been in their favor), alienating even those disbelievers closest to them and, like madmen, over and over, these fiends of the unseen and incredible pursue their hopes only to prove, eventually, that things could have gotten better – much better and could have been better much sooner, too – as confirmed by the fact that they did realize their dreams and things did get much better and it could have happened much sooner than it did…
… leaving jaw-dropped, disbelieving, naysaying cynics speechless, for a minute, until they come to and feverishly try to figure out how to save face and pretend like they were onboard all along.
It's like we’re so terrified of the other shoe falling, we refuse to put the first one on, so we walk around barefoot on stones and nails and shards of glass.
That’s just not smart.
So, why is such a stupid reaction so universal?
There’s a corollary to that one: No one will blame you more harshly than a narcissist committed to doing exactly what they’re blaming you for.
Likewise, no one spurns real faith as rabidly as those in frenzied flight from their own doubts and uncertainties and the real world where their only hope of gaining understanding and genuine confidence lies.
If you have ever accomplished anything in your life – independently, under your own initiative, without coaxing and handholding and mollycoddling and constant supervision – then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
But, maybe, you never connected this realistic, experience-based confidence to achieving world peace and the end of poverty, hunger, disease, deliberate abuse and exploitation, tyrannical oppression, and other suffering.
Why not?
Maybe you thought it would take something laughably ludicrous, magical, miraculous, “supernatural”, or incredible to make any real headway towards those goals.
Why?
You already know how this works.
So, what is the reason for this double-mindedness, knowing full well that it works and how it works in some contexts but “knowing” it’s absolutely impossible in others?
Because you well know, intuitively and instinctively, the kind of scorning, mocking, ridiculing, disparaging, rejection, betrayal, repudiation, conflict, alienation, abandonment, banishment, or even death (whether character-assassinated socially or literally murdered) that will surely beset you were you to stand for what you really want, what you really hope for, and what you’d pursue and work for by faith if only you could be sure you wouldn’t suffer for it.
And there’s the rub.
You’re afraid to suffer.
So, you opt to hide like all the other liars who pretend to be good people while they know full well they’re contributing to the suffering of masses of others, even children.
No one can force you to choose otherwise. I have no intention of forcing your choice. But neither do I have any intention of leaving you free to lie about it as if you’d made the “right” choice when it is an evil choice, a choice to perpetuate and tolerate the heinous evils in this world as long as you can avoid suffering.
And, I hope – as this universal conspiracy of “power”-crazed, control-freak hypocrites increasingly gets exposed, their feeble farce fleeced of its fraudulent sheepskin, and the fucked-to-god fakery they call “power” laid flat and bare for the joke it is – that you’ll change your mind.
I’m not talking about being courageous or daring or especially virtuous here.
I’m just talking about being human, honestly human.
I’m talking about what would be normal for us if not for the FUBARing of our souls.
Having cured, healed, and restored ourselves and each other – yeah, for that it’s going to take us all, together – to healthy, simple humanity, it’s anyone’s guess which way and how far we’ll take things and how far we’ll get to wherever we’re going. I’ve been looking for better ways all my life, ever since the 60s and the Watts riots and the 1968 DNC and Vietnam and Nixon and nothing made any fucking sense — and after more than 50 years of searching earnestly, painfully, and after all I’ve seen, heard, read, done, and understood, no one I know of (including me) has gotten healthy enough to pretend to have real answers. Not yet.
But we’re on the way to getting them.
Besides, not a single one of us or any number of us short of all of us together could possibly find or create real answers, because only all of us together have a hope in hell of achieving the intelligence and information and wisdom that real answers will require.
The idea that we could devise “viable solutions” that will “work” when we can’t even get together to so much as talk about them is tantamount to delusional psychosis. In that sense, there’s truth to the criticism of cynics who look at these wannabe gurus of a new world coming and see through their bullshit. And the idea that we need to find or create ways for FUBARed people to get together and stop their infighting without each and all of us first curing, healing, and restoring ourselves back to true normal, back to a healthy, simple humanity, is a unicorn if there ever was one.
Actually, no, I take that back. Every unicorn I’ve ever seen depicted was something beautiful — not a fucking dumbshit or a fucking liar.
Cynics and rah-rah phonies alike pretend their spineless, shriveled ballsack madness makes sense for only one reason I can see: they’re scared shitless to confront the FUBAR which is, each one, their violated, traumatized, crushed soul. But many of us have done and are doing just that: confronting the evil that’s been done to us, the evil with which it impregnated us, eradicating it within ourselves.
We’re taking the logs out of our eyes. We’re seeing clearer and clearer what terrorized us — and once we do, we see that it’s not only anticlimactically unterrifying, it’s laughable, ridiculous, and utterly scorn-worthy. Monsters. Bogeymen. Ghosts. Demons. Evil spirits. Ego. Shadows. “Pain bodies”.
“What they’ll do to you if you...” – the eternal fear of narcissistic cowards.
Fictions, all. Morbid fantasies that we, in our hysteria, fetish and obsess over.
In fact, not merely fictions, but projections. Projected images of pretended but never-produced “entities” no more real than Invisible Pink Unicorns. In other words, projected lies that are no more than the reified (abstract misrepresented as concrete) hysterical soul-fuckery raging within us, which we deceive ourselves are “things” distinct from us, aka classic dissociation.
“But bullies and thugs and brutes and domestic abusers and dictators and tyrants!”
Yes, we always manage to find personifications of our hysterical fears, idiots only too happy to play the part. Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Idi Amin and Gaddafi were real monsters who killed millions of people – because people wanted them to, inasmuch as they enabled and supported and let them conscript, mind-fuck, and drive their youngsters into fanatical violence.
But that was then, and this is now. Today’s Nazis don’t sport brown shirts. We know now that even Walter Cronkite was bedded in the disinformation machine that we were gullible enough to accept as “news media”. We know that the “Presidency” is a puppet stage for village idiots, charmsters, blatant frauds, and mental incompetents.
It took tens of millions or hundreds of millions of other people like you and me to support monsters as if they were miracle workers and saints – enough people giving enough support that they allowed, enabled, and even participated in pogroms, purges, “cleansings”, ethnocides, and genocides. People who, if not for their appetite for violence, easily could have stopped any such monster after his first two tiny steps, if they’d wanted to stop him.
They didn’t.
But now we know. We know what monsters do, how they do it, how they begin and develop, the nature and specifics of their gaslighting, games, their terror-inducing gyrations and grandstanding.
We’ve seen it. We know it’s all bullshit, theater, dread-inducing showmanship. We know we can choose to treat it as what it is. We know that we can be honest and lend it no credibility, no support, but instead out it for the freakishly stupid, senseless farce that, until now, we’ve all called “power”.
We are in no danger, because they have no weapon against honesty and refusal to give credibility to lies.
The “dangers” we fear and the “risks” we think we run by confronting phantasms we’ve taken for real and personified in “monsters” are every bit as substantial as the phantasms and their threats are not — which is to say, absolutely unreal. Absolutely fictitious. Absolutely false, non-existent, delusory bullshit.
Gaslighting.
But we can bring real danger on ourselves by picking the kind of fight that they do have weapons against — which, by the way, we were also “educated” to do.
Don’t you think there must be a better way than to “protest” to the very same criminal fiends who delighted in violating us, demanding and pleading and begging them to stop violating us, only to gratify them even more?
“See how great and mighty we are, and how they grovel to us like whipped dogs? They need us for everything. They deserve everything we do to them.”
Our groveling before evil people to give up being evil only guarantees that they’ll ignore our whining, then tolerate our wailing, then bring out the clubs and tear gas and bean shot and live rounds and water cannons, and then, if we keep pushing it, mount full scale military attacks as if they were ridding the world of a pack of rabid rats.
You insist that this is the best we can do?
Bullshit.
How many times must that play out before we get real and admit it’s a shit script?
How could it ever work to protest and press “rights” against people who long ago made it abundantly clear that they scorned, despised, and rejected your rights and everyone else’s when they committed the violations you’re protesting? How does, “I have rights,” persuade even a little bit the evildoers who already proved, demonstrably, that you really don’t have any? Not any that could have prevented them from violating you, at least.
Talk about your airy-fairy “rights” all you like, for all the good it’s ever done any of us.
If recognition of your rights didn’t prevent them from violating you then, to which of their motivations, exactly, are you appealing now by pressing recognition of your rights? Or do you think that crimes that have escalated to a level that forces your protest were just matters of simple mistakes, miscalculations, ineptness, or unwitting negligence?
Exactly what would their incentive be – people who pride themselves on their “power” to violate you, having proven their disregard of your flaccid rights by forcible penetration despite them – to reverse themselves for nothing more than shouts and chants from placard-bearing crowds along with a broken window or small fire or overturned car here or there?
You know what they see? It’s not the intimidating sight you flatter yourself to be in your head, as if the sight of tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of protestors daunts them like it would daunt you.
They don’t see masses of human beings for whom they have any care at all. The fact that you outnumber them millions to one makes no difference, because they have proven over and over for millennia how well just one of them can control hundreds of millions of you.
No, they don’t see a threat. They see proof of their “power”.
You might as well be a data point on a scatter plot for all you mean to them. The more, the merrier, too. The number of bodies jamming up the streets reflects and proves (action → equal and opposite reaction) how “powerful” they are. You came to them, after all. They are your focal point, the powerfully large mass that you gravitated to. You do not pose a threat to them – not as long you’re still “protesting”.
All they see is yet one more opportunity to demonstrate their “power” and impress on you your powerlessness, because it all stops when the water cannons and live rounds come out and people start dropping like flies.
That’s the best we can do?
Pfft.
Or do you think you’re going to change the system by submitting and conforming to the system, using its “grievance” channels which by design are so predisposed against any and all grievances that you’ll feel lucky merely to get heard at all? You sincerely think that your grievances, once heard, will get rectified that way?
Fuggedaboutit.
There is only one reason for such an abject failure of imagination, creativity, and good sense. There’s just one reason for perfectly intelligent, well-meaning people to choose such pandering, dismally ineffective, incoherent (hopelessly self-contradictory), doomed avenues.
“But civil rights! MLK! Gandhi!”
Bullshit.
Look at racism in the United States and the current politico-economic condition of India. Go ahead, just tell me that costs to millions of people in “non-violent civil disobedience” – the risk, suffering, life and limb, huge chunks of their lives and assets invested to effect change – was worth its long-term results.
I dare you.
Oh wait! My bad!
There actually wasn’t any real, lasting change. What little change the “civil rights” movement in the US was temporarily allowed was fairly easy and quick to erode, in less than 20 years, leaving papier-mâché figurines in the likeness of what we thought they’d achieved, props in an ongoing charade of “progress”. Are Native Americans being restored in any substantial way after centuries of genocide, or have they received even so little as an apology? Are their women and girls getting kidnapped, raped, and killed less often now than they were 100 years ago? And it’s only been 30 years since the last racist lynching we know of: Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, 1981.
But what better proof that protests have failed miserably than when the protesters themselves become the violators?
The very same people in Seattle who, in 2019, would have sworn allegiance to non-violent ideals – still deeply involved protesting racism, people I’d met with and protested with and knew, counting some even as friends – were the ones who, in 2020 and 2021, turned their hatred against their own family members and friends and neighbors, hatred no less vile than that of any sheet-clad KKK bigot — but not because of our skin color. No, rather, because we refused to wear diapers on our faces and play guinea pigs in Big Pharma’s heinous global experimentation. “Social justice warriors” turned out to be some of the most fiendish, bilious of all.
Look at the socio-politico-economic situation in India. Did Gandhi obliterate the caste system? No, it’s still running strong – as attested by “untouchables” sleeping on sidewalks all over in every major city there. Did the change he ushered in eliminate “honor killings”? I have a friend there who, not even ten years back, faced a parent-arranged marriage to someone other than the girl he loved. I asked him what would happen if he and his sweetheart just ran off and eloped? He said that their families would kill them. And do you really believe that Gandhi and his followers “kicked out the British”? Really? Did India stop acting as Britain’s colony economically and in international trade?
Think so? How precious. You see unicorns, too, apparently.
I’d rather think better of you, so let’s distance ourselves now from this hysterical, psychotic infantilism in which people speak in memes and slogans and dogmas they’ve never actually thought about.
So, on what intelligent, factual, thoroughly studied basis does anyone claim that we can’t do better than everything that’s been tried so far, which aimed at no more than curbing the crimes of the psychotics which we, in idiotic servility, still call “leaders”?
I wish they could tell me.
What exactly shows that we cannot do far better than this?
Bullshitting naysayers need to list all the facts and evidence which show that we cannot eliminate the uninterrupted, systematic brutalization of almost all humanity by a gaggle of psychopaths who just as soon use you for chicken feed as kiss you on the cheek.
After 50 years of digging for it, I have found that the list isn’t just blank – there is no list. No one has been honest enough even to start one.
When it comes to claims of actuality, there is some merit to the idea that the “burden of proof” is on the one making the claim, but in a more serious sense it’s a rather juvenile fallacy fit for classrooms and debaters’ stages without any real connection to what in fact is really happening.
In other words, it’s a word-game gambit. As one philosopher put it:
"Where does the burden of proof lie in a philosophical debate? In a debate of the type we are imagining, the answer is clear--in fact, trivial. The burden of proof lies on the person who's trying to prove something to someone."
-- Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil, p.46
But even aside from that, when it comes to claiming the impossibility or non-viability or infeasibility or impracticality of doing something, especially if we’ve never done it before, let alone studied it thoroughly, the burden of proof lies with the naysayer. Until they have specific, definite knowledge to the contrary, from that position of ignorance, they have no intelligent basis for claiming, “It’s impossible!” regardless what “it” happens to be. To know otherwise would require information which they, being ignorant, do not possess.
Which is more intelligent: closing the possibility question with a baseless claim of “impossible” – merely because someone says so? – or investigating the possibility? And when people have no basis in fact for their naysaying, acting as if they have every reason when they have no reason at all, what exactly is it that motivates them if not factual knowledge – of which they have none? Obviously, they’re motivated by things they’ve hidden. They have reasons which have nothing to do with facts or knowledge – reasons they’re not honest enough to divulge, so they cloak them in the vestiges of truth-seeking.
But the root problem here isn’t that naysayers don’t have basis, facts, or evidence. Nor is the root problem their surreptitious motivations.
The root problem here is that – despite and regardless of all bases, facts, evidence, and motivation – beneath all, they want things to stay the way they are.
They do not want to risk making things better for fear that they might suffer as a result.
They want to believe, “It’s impossible!” just like most people who, like them, flatter themselves as somewhat “successful” and, to prove it, show off the pitiful piles of crumbs they scurried to gather from the floor beneath the masters’ table as if they were hoards of jewels and gold.
They’d love living in a world where idiots didn’t terrorize and subdue everyone else. Who wouldn’t? So why do they swear on the Popes’ graves that it cannot be done? Why can’t it be done? They have no freaking clue that they’re aware of, let alone any that they can produce, or will or want to produce.
They do not want to do what it would take to merely find a way to rid evil from the world. Their arguments amount to a huge pile of rotting, proverbial sour grapes.
The only thing they actually do know about the possibility, realism, or viability of a radically new, evil-eradicated world that operates in honesty, according to trust and care and cooperation, is that they do not want to risk it.
But that wouldn’t be cool in our culture, so they lie – pretending that they do want a better world then kick down every attempt at creating one with the lame, ignorant, cowardly bullshit that, “It could never work.”
All naysayers are liars.
Fuck them.
It would all be so much clearer if they’d just stop fucking lying about it.
No matter how many starve to death or die from disease preventable by clean water and easy sanitation measures, how many children get trafficked into rape slavery and child “marriage” (an estimated 120 million exploited sexually worldwide, and that’s just girls,) nor how many are forced into grueling labor in coltan mines and sweatshops (415 countries, see List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor and Child labour rises to 160 million – first increase in two decades,) nor how many billions live lifetimes in ghettos and slums and hovels threatened existentially every single day – these liars do not want a world free from evil.
They lie that they care, but they absolutely do not care. Forget about them taking action, they can’t even manage to merely talk about eradicating evil. Their eye-rolling, scornful, mocking rejection of the idea of ridding the world of evil is knee-jerk, as if you just tripped wires to spite-packed Claymores protecting the door they dare not allow opened to their hysteria behind it, rabidly clawing and clamoring for release: their terror over their own apocalyptic fantasies of the ramifications of confronting and eradicating evil.
Or better put, these hypocrites care a great deal about shutting down any talk about realistically eradicating evil, because – forget about merely admitting the possibility of doing something about it – they cannot bear even approaching the question of if a possibility is there to admit.
At this point, I can tell you with no uncertainty or doubt, that cannot-do-better, must-tolerate-lesser-evils deniers are liars. All of them. Their denial of the possibility and viability of a world free from evil has nothing to with what’s really going on or what’s realistically possible. That’s clear, because if they were interested in reality, they would explore and investigate it. Instead they front bullshit as if it were divine truth in order to forestall and prevent any serious discussion, exploration, and investigation.
Why would any honest, intelligent person choose deliberate denial and feigned ignorance?
Like I said, there is only one reason for such an abject failure of imagination, creativity, and good sense. There’s just one reason for perfectly intelligent, well-meaning people to choose pandering, dismally ineffective, incoherent (hopelessly self-contradictory), doomed avenues over and over, way past the point where hoping for a different outcome rose to the level of insanity.
Fear of suffering.
This full-blown cult refusal to look, listen, investigate, and learn, having zero relevance to the truth, (i.e., what’s actually going on,) is neither for nor against the truth, because truth as their primary concern was supplanted, somewhere at some time, by fear of suffering and a hysterical obsession with avoiding suffering. Once fear of suffering grabs the driver’s wheel, truth becomes irrelevant. Cultic “Truth” becomes any and all ideas consistent with avoiding suffering at all costs, and cultic “lies” or “untruths” become any and all ideas which even hint of a risk of suffering.
In other words, their primary concern has shitall to do with what is or is not really going on.
For naysayers, it’s all about avoiding the suffering and loss and inconvenience and discomfort that they’re sure – again, lacking any factual basis – would beset them should they try to do better and create or find ways to do good that eradicates evil. Not only do they naysay and mock and oppose the prospect of wiping evil off the map, they cancel anyone else who tries to talk or do something about it, too.
The tragedy?
Thanks to their perversely self-inflicted dearth of understanding, they have no clue or way of realizing that the suffering which is actually involved in eradicating evil isn’t remotely as fearsome or loathsome as – not the realities of confronting eradicating evil, of which they know nothing – but their own fantasies that they cower down to in their hysteria. I and others have tried and are finding and creating the very ways that naysayers whip out crosses and garlic against, and we’ve found out that our expectation of suffering prophesied by our hysteria as a dreadful certainty was bullshit, the product of gaslighting. That suffering does not exist. Inconvenience, sure. Risk and fear in anticipation, sure — which prove to be baseless once you have taken action in spite of them.
Actual, painful, harmful suffering?
Think about it a minute. If you had the power to eradicate evil – and you do, you’ve just been lied and beaten and abused into thinking otherwise – just how much suffering would you incur? Reddened skin? Bruises? Scratches? Lacerations? Skin peeled from body? Lost limbs? Lost head?
Maybe you’re thinking about being overcome by evil, not overcoming and eradicating it.
The fact is, very, very few of us (me included) have much clue of what it’s actually like to overcome and eradicate evil with good.
But some of us are learning, and what I’ve learned, at least, resembles what I imagined it would be about as much as a car crusher resembles a tweezers.
The suffering I feared was nonexistent. The suffering I actually experienced was a surprise, unanticipatable, all about realizing how far and deep and severely mind-fucking my illusions were, illusions I’d taken for truths about people and situations I’d trusted but which, once I took a stand and did something about the evil I saw, turned out to love the evil and hate me instead of the other way around.
Even people who are frank about wanting a better world don’t believe that evil can and will be eradicated. Ignore, for a moment, that they have no basis for their cynical skepticism of the possibility – and what basis in reality could there be for such a hysterical superstition? – their two chief objections are themselves incoherent:
1. From their standpoint of abject ignorance, since they’ve never even attempted but rather intently avoided the ways and means and methods they staunchly naysay, they cannot fathom how any such could possibly be done even when it easily can be done.
2. From a standpoint of even greater ignorance than that, they swear – even if we did manage to do any such – it would fail.
Recall the most vocal, daring rebels you know of who took incredible action against the crimes of authorities. Not a one of them advocated eradicating evil. That goal lies far, far beyond every revolutionary’s credibility horizon. They aimed at no more than overcoming evildoers.
Overcoming evildoers is not remotely the same as eradicating the evil they want and try to do along with their capacity and means to do it.
How many people do you think there are on the planet with even a dim impression of this gargantuan difference? How many have the slightest fucking clue what I’m talking about?
If they can’t tell the difference, can’t even see what a difference might look like, and have no clue what “eradicating evil” even means, then how the fuck do they come off claiming that there is no difference and it can’t be done?
Theirs is nothing but an irrational, hysterical superstition – cult thinking based on brainwash programming, subliminal conditioning, and the debilitating effects of long-standing, traumatic abuse.
Tragically, they will never know – not in their cult state of mind – that the power and rewards of eradicating evil are so far beyond “worth it”, it’s not even worth mentioning what little suffering we actually go through in the process.
The only real suffering we experience by eradicating evil is the pain of being disabused of our delusions. It’s almost as if cultist would rather grind, wear out, wither, and rot in fact than face the fact of how FUBAR they have become.
They’ll never realize any of this as long as they refuse to confront evil and refuse to rectify their own hysteria – or even admit it’s there.
Mothers have more guts than naysayers do. A mother’s suffering in pregnancy and childbirth is real. And yet, like an ancient sage said, “… but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world.”
No wonder another ancient writer says, “eye has not seen, nor ear heard” what is in store for us – just like parents have no clue what their child has in store for them.
The very unimaginability of “eye has not seen, nor ear heard” that excites and drives us who want real change scares the shit out of cynics.
I dare all you cynical naysayers, everywhere: explain, exactly, how are we who are committed to eradicating evil from Earth supposed to demonstrate to you the viability of ways, means, and methods which neither you nor we know about yet? How are we going to show you that “it will work” when neither you nor we know what “it” is?
How does your lame attempt at, “Put your money where your mouth is!” having never seen any such money before, make the slightest sense at all?
In other words, your challenge is itself incoherent.
Are you really that stupid?
No, but you’re really that dishonest.
You’re not saying, “It’s impossible!” as if you had a single clue about it. You’re saying that it’s stupid or wasted or dangerous to look into the possibility – thus guaranteeing that you’ll never get a single clue about it. More precisely, you’re saying that it’s stupid or wasted or dangerous to merely admit that there is a possibility to look into.
Even as dumb as those claims are, you’re shit out of luck clueless of any reason or factual basis for believing any of it.
Fucking cultist is what you are.
Go ahead, you mendacious cynics, show us what you would do to convince us that the better mousetrap you have in mind but haven’t even designed yet “will work”. Show us how it’s “viable”. When you’re still at the stage where you’re completely convinced that there must be a better way but haven’t figured out what it is yet, show us what that way is and prove to us that it will work and convince us that it will be better.
And then, while claiming that there cannot be better without the slightest clue what you’re talking about, because neither you nor we have even imagined it yet, show us how you make any fucking sense at all. And show us how moronic thinking like that has any relevance whatsoever, any bearing at all, on what actually is possible, could be viable, and might be far, far better than anything the feeble excuse you con off as “thinking” has ever come up with.
And then, explain how, exactly, any of your denials and decrials and baseless predictions and moronic declarations add up to a pissdrop of a reason why those who have real faith should stop dreaming and looking and trying and talking about making the world radically better.
Who the fuck made you the Possibility Police?
Substantiate your self-inflated pretensions to “authority”.
I dare you.
There’s nothing quite like getting called out to try on your own damn foot the irrational shoe you try to force onto others, is there? Busted.
But it’s not about the shoe at all, is it? Nothing will satisfy you until you have constricted and reduced all truly imaginative creativity and innovation, along with the faith to pursue them, down to miniature knockoffs that fit into the pea brain you’re currently comfortable with.
Which means you won’t be satisfied until you’ve limited the domain of the possible until it basically matches the domain of the familiar.
Which means you won’t be satisfied until you’ve reduced the change required to go from this to that, from now to then, to barely any change at all.
Which means – categorically, no doubt, no discernible question about it – that you do not want anything to change significantly, let alone radically.
You’d rather die and take us with you than risk the suffering you’re sure that real change will incur.
That’s unacceptable.
Not gonna to happen.
We won’t let it.