Caveat legit

For us who are trying to make sense of the world, the most important thing to keep in mind is that our schooling from earliest childhood and everything we read and we hear as adults, all has been filtered through a sophisticated propaganda and disinformation machine. Our education was designed not to strengthen our discerning minds, but to control us. We evolved with good instincts for knowing whom to trust and how to evaluate information that is presented to us; but those very instincts have been hijacked and manipulated by people who understand us better than we understand ourselves.

For the first time in human history, there exists a well-developed experimental science informing the technology of making people believe falsehoods. This is the legacy of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, of Nazi experiments in brainwashing (which continued in the US as MKUltra), and of Operation Mockingbird. Do you remember the Church Committee Hearings of 1976? Do you know the origin of the term “memory hole”?

“I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. We must see to it that this agency [NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” — U.S. Senator Frank Church, 1975

With the explosion of the internet in the 1990s, people could communicate widely, unmediated by central control, and there was for a time an opportunity for mental jailbreak on a global scale. This era ended with the monopolies of tech media giants, Google, Facebook and Twitter, which are able to filter out the most dangerous truths from the public forum, to rein the conversation within acceptable bounds.

We all have a deep need to belong and to be accepted. Holding to a view of the world that is different from the people we love and trust is not possible for humans, with the rarest of exceptions. Our sense-making is collective, and that’s a good thing, because in exchanging ideas and stories with one another, we can paint a more realistic picture than any of us might have been able to do on our own. But for one who understands how collective sense-making works, the communal mind becomes a target for mass deception. The result is that we all feel reassured by the consonance of our beliefs with all the people who seem most sensible and trustworthy and astute, and we don’t suspect that the whole system has been invisibly subverted by strategically-located bots and algorithms. Already in 1948, Eric Arthur Blair explained to us how this would work. He, too, has been disposed in the memory hole.

We who are best educated and most sophisticated think we are immune to this influence, and our smugness makes us easier targets. We look down on the unwashed masses and imagine they have been manipulated by fake news. We would do better to listen to them and learn what we can. Most of them know that they are being manipulated, and the most astute among them have figured out some things to which our demographic remains blind.

We think we understand what money is, how communities are put together, how governments function and how nations relate to each other. That is, we think we have a fundamental understanding of what makes people tick, and how the world works; but we have been victims of a grand illusionist.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
— Bertrand Russell

We who are scientists are the most trusting of all, and the easiest to manipulate by people who speak our language, who reason plausibly in scientific terms, and who have credentials from the best academic institutions. Most of these scientific thought-leaders have been unconsciously manipulated in turn, and are most effective in their deceit because they believe what they are saying. The science establishment has excluded whole fields of study, convincing us that they are ruled out by “settled science” and not worth our time. Everything from Joseph of Cupertino to cold fusion to UFOs. (Better not to get me started on the subject of vaccines.) Feynman warned us to “remember-you are the easiest one to fool”.

“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” — J.B.S. Haldane

This is a metaphysical statement, a source of wonder, and a path to Einstein’s religion. It’s about things that no one on earth knows, and which may be forever beyond the limited minds of the human species. Of course. But that’s not what I’m referring to. What I’m talking about is more mundane than this and harder to accept: The Big Bang and Darwinian Evolution and the Higgs Boson are all stories that have some truth in them, but the framework within which we accept them has also been shaped by deliberate deception, orchestrated by people who know more about fundamental science than we do; and they don’t want us to know what they know.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false. — William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Realizing this may seem very discouraging and very useless. If we come to believe that everything we thought we knew is false, where do we begin to pick up the pieces? Actually, this revelation offers a pointer out of the darkness: We may not be able to know what is true in any absolute sense, but we can seek to discover who is trying to deceive us, and what it is that they want us to believe. If it is too daunting to reboot our quest for truth from Kindergarten, we can begin by freeing our minds from those falsehoods that we have taken in for the convenience of a powerful Other.

For J. S. Bach, the entire context of his life and work was Christ the Savior who died for our sins. Do you think he was silly and superstitious, and you know better than Bach? William James and William Shakespeare both believed in ghosts. Do we know something they didn’t know? For Socrates, ideas and shapes and mathematical objects were real, while the physical world had a kind of tentative, shadowy existence that you couldn’t really hang your hat on. He was wrong, of course. Only material reality exists. Isaac Newton believed that he could make metals come alive in his laboratory. He fancied himself a prophet who could extract truths from mathematics hidden in the Bible and from the architectural proportions of Solomon’s Temple. From what we would call numerology, he calculated that the world would end in 2060. You and I are too sophisticated to take that kind of thing seriously.

The belief systems of all these towering geniuses were shaped by the prevalent philosophies of the communities in which they lived. So, of course, are ours. But they had an advantage we don’t have. The communal knowledge systems in which they were embedded were emergent, historical contingencies. They did not have to contend with a powerful, centralized authority with access to scientific methods of mind control. Today, you and I are constrained in the ideas that are allowed into our heads by the communities we trust and the sources we read. It is likely that the world-views of Shakespeare and Socrates were closer to reality than ours.

I’ve made my point. Not only is it folly to think that, thanks to Science, we have now arrived at a Truth that evaded all previous generations. More than this: It is arrogance to think that you and I have been able to figure out what is true despite deep deception from a scientific system powered by a century of research in mind control techniques.

If our meditation practice has not yet provided us the Wisdom of Not Knowing, then perhaps a little research into the history of the National Intelligence Services will help us along.

- JJM

Originally published at http://dailyinspirationblog.wordpress.com on December 20, 2020.