Some years ago, I was interrupted while reading, on a tram, on my way to Hawthorn. The agent of this uninvited disturbance was a Hare-Krishna devotee (out among the illusional masses) who, in employment of his obvious training, sat down, and asked me what I thought the biggest problem was in the world. I don't quite know what he expected me to say, but I had replied: The mishandling of thought, and the subservience to glamour (my standard method of arresting the dumpling-brains in their tracks and kindling the curious minded into life).
Well, I don't think that was in his manual so, he fell back on his training and asked me if I did not think that the biggest problem was not, in fact, ignorance (obviously this was the reply he wanted). I replied: That I thought that was what I just said. There followed a garbled stream of nonsense that is always ejected from the brain when ideology meets mentation: the collision of the what-to-think with the how-to-think.
The ability to parse information and the skill of relating the gathered facts and forming some sort of relationships the basis of all reasoning; a truth of any kind is the offspring of the proof of a relationship between two real 'things'. This basic model of observation in on its last legs.
The above anecdote brings me to my point; that in our present culture there is such a profound emphasis, to the point of religious like mechanics, on memorizing 'what is so' without any recognition of the evils that flow from isolated single investments. I notice this, particularly among the young, who, are so glamorized (by which I mean the investing of the emotions in a set of lexicon like opinions, beliefs and conceptions, bypassing the natural watchtower tendency of the mind) by the media narrated world as it is presented; they react, without consideration, believing themselves to have been astute in those thoughts they hold to be truths of the world, when in fact they are merely trained well, like Pavlov's dog to respond to the ringing of the bell; they are active, believing themselves to be taking part in the moral husbandry of the world when in fact they are behaving as programmed, and they opine, believing their thoughts are original, correct and in no way corrupted, when they are in fact reinforcing lies. They have proved their training, acted out their roles, and parroted the propaganda of a sinister financial elite who have planned this all from day one, for control, profit and the hobby of tyranny.
I was trained in advertising; I was trained in the science of colour and how that alters mood and disposition, I was trained in words and how to change advertising copy to alter buyers behaviour, I was trained on how to tailor the same message depending on the demographics. I was trained to manipulate people into behaviour that they thought was their own. This was in the 1980s.
The military-narrative-industrial complex that is the world wide media employees designers, psychologists, research companies, wordsmiths, imagery, associative memetics, all to make you think that such and such, is so and so. It works—brilliantly.
I am constantly surprised by the amount of people that cannot conceive that those in power, whose budgets of industry soar into the billions, are incapable of wishing any vice upon their fellow man. By means of some invisible assumption the fools at the botttom believe that: politics cannot be fixed or owned; democracy is the free from greed and interference; capitalism is bad and the cause of all injustice; that 'science says' is equal in weight to what used to be 'God revealed to me' and that wind-farms will save us from global warming and overpopulation.
Upon examination, it is found that the reverse is true on all these things. This disease of ideology is virulent more in the left wing that the right. The left wing have examples in history of their philosophies gone too far; the left have not yet had that pleasure and so never examine their principles; nor indeed take examination on if they possess them or not. Socrates was right - relentless uncomfortable questions are more important than answers.
It is sad beyond any metric. If you failed to investigate any opinion that you hold, particularly one by which you navigate your life, then your 'ownership' of that opinion by an act of theft, for it is was never yours by right of understanding. To repeat another's opinion without understanding it, is to steal.
