- SOME BIG FAT LIES

A partial list of lies by type. How can elites lie so often, so consistently, so shamelessly and with so much professional arrogance? Those questions drove me to write Learner.  

MAIN PAGE PRINCIPALE : WWW.WWCOVIDGM.ORG

Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:06 trivialize the importand and magnify the insignificant
• 16:14 list of lies
• 33:53 lies and the routine of evil

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
 From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld 
Learner, begin

- SOME BIG FAT LIES -

“In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie is a misdemeanor, the declaration of the truth a crime.” Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time.

“The first casualty of war is truth.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html 

We can dismiss commercial advertisers and government spokespeople as stealth liars who mislead the public without cease or until someone slaps the truth out of them. Repelled by honesty, they fall back on the truth only under intense probing. Even then, they do so reluctantly and temporarily. They would rather bury whopping lies under an avalanche of borderline truths. For them, meaningless monologue is better than balanced debate; credible lies, to the truth. The big fat lie is their duty, their rice bowl and their “honor.” How deluded can they be or can they make us?

Here in the United States, “balanced reporting” means that unjustifiable policies merit more favorable TV airtime than the others, and more exculpatory ink in the press. Thus the unacceptable is validated by rote repetition. Trump got a hundred times more media coverage than Bernie Sanders. 

Blatant sociopaths and outed conmen get more media adulation than honest folk. Reactionaries are paired off against conservatives, Demoblicans against Republicrats. Their pro forma (for the sake of appearance) arguments simulate controversy while the underlying tyranny remains carefully undisturbed. Televised “debate” opposes contestants who accept the scandalous status quo with equal fervor but whose marginal disputes masquerade as debate. This is standard fare in “balanced” American reporting.

There are other examples of this institutional duplicity. Industrialists bewilder comparison-shoppers by issuing household products in off-size, fractional-unit containers: 1.32 lbs., 8.3 liquid pints, 0.7 liters: same product, different companies, different prices. Solve in one minute. Serving sizes are shrunk to play down their noxious content. Such “single serving” portions would not satisfy the appetite of a child.

No warning label shows that food has been irradiated, or contains genetically engineered ingredients, or that meat was raised in factory farms cramming poisons and neutralizing antibiotics through their overuse. Such labels would end the sale of those experimental products. They cost much less to produce than those they replace (“organic” ones, raised the old way) yet are priced just as high or higher. They may well be harder to clean up afterwards, and at greater expense than their subsidized production cost and censored labeling indicate. 

These manufacturers protest the expense they incur reporting their products’ nutritional content: trivial sums compared to the fortune spent on advertising.

Corporations never stop whining about government regulation. Unfortunately for them, it is the only mechanism that can restrain their worst schemes. Each new regulation is a token response to corporate wrongdoing. In the name of “healthy” competition, every corporate board would imitate each new fraud they thought they could get away with. In the absence of further regulation, anyone who did not imitate his most crooked competitor would go out of business. Corporate crime precedes each new regulation and every follow-up corporate protest. 

Since 9/11, the pursuit of terrorist suspects has taken up almost all the Federal Justice system’s resources. That mandate has recently been replaced by the mass incarceration of misdemeanor immigrants. Meanwhile, corporate crime goes uninvestigated in most cases.

Catch a previously quiet mega-corporation praising itself in new TV ads or on a full-page newspaper spread, and find out, more often than not, it was just caught red-handed at some recent outrage.

The ruinous Savings and Loan bailout, rotten commercial airline service, runaway power and health care costs and recent corporate bookkeeping scandals of growing scale and impunity, all of them demonstrate what happens when corporations regulate themselves. Their officers “regulate” themselves all the way to the bank. Profiteering from the serial laissez-faire of the last six Presidents, the fossil fuel/nuke cartel has replaced government regulation with a generous welfare state for corporations. So much for the “free market” and its “self-regulation”! As expected, Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” is only skilled at shell games.

Iceland was the only European country that got through the recession of 2008 and emerged from it more or less intact. Liable bankers got nothing but jail time; the national response to their demand for a bailout was “sink or swim.” As with Roman Legions sometimes panic-struck but never replaceable, decimation was the ultimate resolution for “too big to fail.”

Let's hope those slimy hypocrites never get their hands on Social Security funds. They’ve been drooling over them for years. If so, we’ll grow old as paupers despite our lifetime of mandatory savings. As it stands, Congress has dipped its mitts into this till during one or more unbalanced fiscal years. 

“Stand by for this important political spoof! Instead of watching your retirement fund evaporate in the Stock Exchange, report immediately to the nearest casino and gamble it away at house odds. May the free market prevail once and for all!” 

Seriously, I’m kidding. If only those house odds were reliably profitable or safe enough for the gambler. What about a casino mulligan, as in golf? You could leave with what you walked in with, minus a small entrance fee. Mere life support earnings, for the most part. After all, these would be government-subsidized casinos on PeaceWorld.

The abrupt distress of the American middle class results from decades of captive 401K retirement savings and their compulsory diversion into disastrous stock market investments. Such savings would vanish the moment the stock market collapsed, as it has done with more and more chaotic frequency and volatility over time.

The term “deregulation” is secret code for “substandard service at the maximum price.” An elaboration of capitalists’ favorite slogan: “Profits for the few, at the risk and expense of the many,” the best definition of national-capitalism, the latest perfection of weapon exploitation.

Commercial advertising clogs already limited broadcast channels with white noise static gushing from the mass media. It occurred to me that almost all the broadcast programming (films, TV, radio and the Internet) wastes the maximum amount of the viewing public’s time while transmitting the least amount of useful information. Go watch a few hours of this mass-produced gobbledygook and see for yourself.

This phenomenon can only be described as a planetary conspiracy to trivialize the important and magnify the trivial. After all, a lot of trivial information of little use to anyone is easier to control from above than the important kind for one or all, whatever its volume.

There are hundreds of cable television channels broadcasting 24/365. Many person-days go into each hour of this broadcast. Think about it. Not only are there actors, directors, writers, producers and their technical staff; but plain old accountants, HR and support personnel, guards and miscellaneous staffers; all of them and their workday life devoted to producing perhaps twenty minutes per hour of useful information on one channel alone. And my definition of “useful” is more than generous. The rest of this monumental effort perpetuates meaningless noise. Multiply by every nation on Earth and its television industry. The only good analogy I can think of, is that of Egyptians massed by the thousands to build, guild and furnish dead-weight pyramids. They, at least, built massive monuments, while our efforts produce nothing more than electro-magnetic buzz. 

No-one analyzes user needs and targets information to suit temperament and taste. Clumsy attempts to do so are attacked as invasions of privacy. 

We are obsessive-compulsive about information. If it appears to be personally or institutionally useful, we hoard it, ration it and restrict its access at the slightest provocation. Our ancestors used to burn each other alive over original new ideas. Nowadays, we create repetitious trash piles of them – in accordance with our “business model.” “Our product is better than theirs” — without regard to the cares of the audience. We are smothered under mounds of useless information. This mass OCD syndrome demands manifold liberation at both personal and communal levels.

For those of us on the receiving end of this useless babble, it’s like being locked in a cell with a chatterbox bereft of taste, refinement, honesty and modesty. We are exposed to perverse standards of ethics, esthetics, materialism and sex framed by brutality. Routine criminality and its vicious suppression are the norm. Useless products and services are jammed down our throat 24/7. 

It’d be like determining the quality if a library, the shelves of which were piled with bookends and a handful of trashy paperbacks. If all the monologue machines shut down at once, the accumulation of disinformation would be bad enough. We rapt listeners, however, repeat this nonsense to each other all day long and then go home to absorb another evening’s worth. Our zombie hypnosis worsens every day. 

If a School Board caught one of their teachers foisting this kind of trash on students, that teacher would be fired on the spot. With perfect justification, you’d slam your door in the face of any salesperson who would dare to brainwash your children that way. Yet the media mislead us by default. Criminal disinformation disgorges from it without letup. An equivalent yield of unalloyed truth might enlighten us.

Big Fat Lies induce the Routine of Evil, the way too many sweets induce tooth decay. According to professional liars, the truth is a raw dough to be kneeded and baked to their employer’s convenience. Anyone “stupid” enough to reject such a notion is their favorite candidate for future abuse. 

Contemplate the end of such parasite livelihoods. A Niagara of lies and irrelevancies would come to a halt. Deafening silence! Yet we would still need products and services; government would still impose its sorry burden. In short, life would go on. We’d just stop absorbing Big Fat Lies so often. Mr. Honesty and Ms. Goddess might become better companions in the absence of so many lies from Big Brother and Bimbo Borax. Who would miss all those wanton lies?

“Sales of products are less important than we think. Just look at the communist countries: the millions of pictures of Lenin displayed everywhere you go certainly do not stimulate love of Lenin. The advertising agencies of the Communist Party (the so-called agitprop departments) have long forgotten the practical goal of their activity, (to make the communist system better liked), and have become an end in themselves: they have created their own language, their formulas, their aesthetics, (the heads of the agencies once had absolute power over art in their countries), their idea of the right life-style, which they cultivate, disseminate, and force upon their unfortunate peoples.” Milan Kundera, Immortality, Translated by Peter Kussi, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1991, p. 113. By permission of Grove/Atlantic. 

Have you taken a good look at a new automobile lately? We are drummed to death how sleek, beautiful, elegant and sexy they are. Actually, they are lousy investments: anti-social, ecocidal, elitist, hierarchical, filthy, stinking, unreliable, counter-ergonomic, uncomfortable, dangerous, inefficient, usually inert, invasive, overpriced, poisonous, poverty-inducing, crime promoting, city destroying and guaranteed obsolescent. 

Some clear night, lean on the handrail of a highway overpass. Note the torrent of light, heat and steel running up and down the highway; it should flow down a volcano instead. All our cities have turned into active volcanoes. Such a waste of precious energy! 

A black mamba might be more attractive than any of those automobiles. We have turned them into one-ton key chains, religious idols and class totems. In so doing, we’ve ignored the obvious. 

Of course, automobiles offer the illusion of convenience. This illusion would evaporate if a small fraction of the fortune devoted to them were spent to rationalize public transit. 

Look around you the next time you take a walk downtown. Note the patina of pollution that paints the gutter, the stench that fills our nostrils and the sepia smear that shrouds the horizon. Such real-life excreta never mar pristine auto ads, even though they flood our awareness so much that we don't notice them any longer, neither the commercial blather nor the crappy environment they promote. Note how neighborhoods flood that were dry for decades as more and more forests are paved over to satisfy the auto-Mammon. More and more “development” and exports of cheap logs in exchange for auto and fuel imports that collapse the balance of trade. Note how your eyes burn and how smog-laced pollen turns simple hay fever into chronic asthma for, how many, four out of ten urban children and more as time goes by?

Global warming has become a Cosmic Phenomenon, another Act of God beyond human understanding and control, whereas it’s just the farts of our automobiles, livestock, factories and power plants. 

Cast your mind back to burghers of the Middle Ages. With some justification, we could sneer at their foolishness. Among other lethal idiocies, they threw excrement out into the street for livestock and passersby to squelch through. Future Learners will sneer at us for much the same reason. Just as foolishly, we foul our soil, water and skies; abuse the poor shamelessly; and hearken to medieval trivia instead of addressing matters of importance. What stupid hicks!

For most people (heck, for almost everyone, ourselves included), truth is merely a matter of repetition. What we’ve heard most often, no matter how vague, must be the truth. We can be persuaded that night is day, say, that some foreign power is secretly out to get us, or that private automobiles are beautiful … provided enough people and machines repeat it to us. Suckered into subsidizing the blitzkrieg industry, we refuse to admit this disgrace. Instead, we pay armies of copywriters to broadcast the obvious lie that automobiles are “sexy.” Lumps of plastic and lacquered scrap-metal cut, wrapped and welded by the ton, farting and drooling poisons: sexy? According to what sexual deviant?

Then, let’s subvert mass transit and make the most promising alternate technologies disappear. Finally, get everyone to repeat: “The fix would just cost too much, (deep sigh!).”

Then there’s this other nonsense. “Government is no good at reducing poverty, improving education, redistributing abundance, improving science and delivering justice. We should make government as powerless, slow and stupid as possible.” Regardless of its inevitable growth. 

Of course, government cannot provide such services when reactionaries make it their business to sabotage them. However, talented Learners could empower the poor with new policies of some imagination, if only the reactionaries were held off their backs for a while: our obvious duty and advantage. 

Tell me, who pulled off the following projects? Emancipation from slavery, ending the Great Depression, the Marshall Plan of European economic recovery (and its Asian equivalents), and manned space flight to the Moon, etc. … Was it central government or a loose gaggle of rich individuals? Now tell me. Who triggered slavery; the Great Depression and its 2008 clone; the collapse of Third World economies; who set up the American economic landscape as rich, gated communities surrounded by a new Third World; corresponding despoilment of the middle class; the collapse of space exploration; etc. … was it central government or a loose gaggle of powerful, private interests with their hands in the cash drawer? 

Of course, talented liars and propagandists fill valuable niches: those of troubadour, storyteller, actor, magician, seer, priest, shaman and Learner. A Golden Age of storytelling awaits us once all this organized lying is stripped of profit. 

These days, we gorge on surrogate violence, reactionary propaganda, redundant sports and soap opera drivel, all of it mass-produced. In the future, more and more Learners will concentrate on their topics of passion. Taking a break from their cherished Learning, they will take pleasure in the most outrageous inventions that talented liars can spin: fine stories, plays and other entertainment. But none of this will detract from the honesty of Learner government.

I can think of at least nineteen sub-sets of the Big Fat Lie currently mass-produced and mass-consumed (it takes two to tango):

1. Dogmatic lies: fictions are asserted to be truths despite their obvious falsehood. Obvious lies are broadcast to a misled public and repeated by it (by commission) or accepted by neglecting the truth (by omission). Consult the denial of global warming. Good God, so many lies promoted so assiduously and so often — by whom and to what purpose? These questions gave birth to Learner all by themselves.

2. Simplifying lies: your judgment is too limited to grasp the complex validity of my claim. I lie to simplify my rap. You will yield to my demands without forcing me to cultivate our mutual understanding. (Representative democracy). 

In reverse mode, the complicating lie: my friends and I can make pretty straightforward transactions so complicated that only we can decode their tattered logic, fill our pockets and empty yours (tax law).

3. Paternal lies: the truth would set panic loose among ignorant masses. We lie to protect their childlike innocence. Selflessly, we bear truths they couldn’t handle (sigh). The fundamental question shared here: can professional liars handle the truth better than the rest of us? Please note the “Yes” response that serves them best. 

This lie extends to so-called “Democracy.” Majorities abandon painfully honest candidates like Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders, in favor of carnival barkers and con men. Take your pick of American Presidents, their nearest challengers at home and equivalents abroad. They need not be “politically correct” the way that term is misused today by those who support the worst acts of “political wrong.” But they should meet the needs of special interests at the expense of the common good.

4. Altruistic lies: the truth would hurt worse than our reassuring falsehoods. Well-meaning adults slather this lie on their children’s awareness. Santa Claus and other child-targeting myths persist despite their double-edged effect on children. “Trust no one and nothing, not even under the best circumstances.” This way, we are reduced to a lifetime of suspicion under a nonstop bombardment of lies.

5. Post-abuse lies: victims (and especially their descendants) exaggerate or bury their torment, demonize their oppressors and prejudge their oppressors’ descendants. Ex-tormentors justify their abuse, minimize it and try to make the public forget it. Onlookers of past wrongs sugarcoat their moral cowardice by blurring their criminal negligence.

6. Self-serving lies: my interests are compromised by your truth. They take priority over your right to learn which is unimportant to me. 

7. Weapon (and corporate) lies: every public truth is a gift to the enemy. Information of a quality superior to manipulative propaganda must be restricted. Unclassified information must be incomplete, distorted and/or false. To confuse things further, many trivial truths should be added to the mix at random. Any admission of error grants a boon to the enemy and must be covered up. 

Military discipline is punishment-based; so weapon technicians lie as often as they can to avoid punishment, maintain best-kept secrets and report the completion of impossible tasks. Mounds of punishment are shoveled to suppress these habits, which just engenders additional military terror: the special talent of weapon managers. 

8. Natural lies: “I am a part of your tissue or harmless to you. Do not attack me; feed me instead”: cancers, parasites, vampires, infectious agents, embryos, and bird’s nest mimics. Alternately (and often reinforced by factual exceptions), “I am poisonous or another predator or just a twig. Don’t attack me.” Alternately again, “I am full of nutritious sap — land here and pollinate me.” 

Another interesting corporate fallacy asserts that manufactured pollution is “natural” and therefore acceptable because man produced it. Man is part of nature, after all. Was the Plague “valid” because it was natural and because humans helped to transmit it? 

Another sub-heading of the natural lie encompasses our perception of reality. Sensory data flood our awareness in volumes beyond our ability to process. In compensation, we draw a fine trickle from this torrent and form a picture of reality from it alone. Selecting the few stimuli it considers important, our mind fills the gaps creatively and weaves a stylized approximation of reality. 

Mental sanity is defined by fidelity to the gross, material reality our abstractions delineate. If every stimulus triggered equal perception, we would be fully aware but flooded with raw stimuli, as helpless as acid-freaks or day-old infants. 

As carnal beings, we lie to ourselves as often as we blink.

9. Revolutionary lies: if we must endure amidst a stupefied populace trapped in a tissue of lies and crushed under endless tyranny, why not lie like bandits to brace ourselves and support the revolutionary counter-attack? Promoting one evil to combat another, greater, that is a dangerous vortex to get sucked into and a difficult one to escape. Promoting the truth to harvest more benefits – even if at lesser efficiency – would that not be better?

10. Scientific lies: data conflicting with the latest science dogma is shrugged off as irrelevant, dismissed without inquiry, branded as leftover superstition or, worse yet, pseudo-science. As if weapon science were much more than humanity’s latest collective fantasy … until we switch channels during the next commercial break. 

All too often, new discoveries are written off because gifted individuals achieve unique breakthroughs under optimal conditions that cannot necessarily be repeated, since most of the parameters are only half-understood or not at all. If every science doctrinaire’s grad assistant cannot repeat the feat at the drop of a hat, it is declared non-existent.

Believe it or not, the question “why” is forbidden by current science: another reason so many Learners turn their back on it (and another obvious waste of talent by weapon mentality). No question should be forbidden to interested Learners for any reason.

I suppose we should make a distinction here, between science mentality and science technology. At best, science mentality includes the open-minded flexibility, relentless honesty, clinical precision and rigorous methodology scientists love to brag about. At worst, science technology produces the stink, poison, fear, pain, and crushing sense of dread and helplessness we endure: the direct outcome of the rabid rivalry, closed mindedness, indifference to consequences, self-promoting dishonesty and lack of fellow feeling that weapon scientists promote. 

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in Out of Revolution (William Morrow and Co., New York, 1938, p. 231), quotes the French philologist Gaston Paris [my translation], who proclaims: 

“I profess this doctrine absolutely and without reservation: that Science has no other object than the truth for its own sake, without any compunction about practical consequences, good or bad, regrettable or beneficial. Anyone who permits himself – through patriotism, religion or even morality – the least dissimulation, the slightest alteration of the facts he studies or conclusions he draws, is not worthy of his place in the Great Laboratory where the admission ticket of honesty is more fundamental than that of capability. Thus understood and pursued in the same spirit in every civilized country, communal studies form a Great State that spans restrictive, diverse and often hostile nations; a State no war can sully, no conqueror can menace, where our souls may find the shelter and unity that the City of God once provided.” 

It would be hard to find a more passionate pledge of allegiance to Absolute Science. This fanatical defense of Absolute Truth (or any other Absolute, for that matter) entails more devastating results than any other lie listed here. The Absolute is an ideal terrain for the simplification of reality whose ultimate expressions are political terror and mass murder. 

I am convinced that there are almost no incontrovertible truths, only more or less useful approximations — certainly not a hundredth of the absolute truths men uphold unto someone else’s death, much less those held to be absolute that underlie Western logic and culture. Uncertainty may promote reflexive rejection of what is new or its review for usefulness. If I highlight speculation and conjecture, it is to reinforce receptiveness to new ideas that orthodox bureaucracies forbid.

11. Hermetic lies: in order to promote internal morale and cohesion, we undercover fellows adopt weighty oaths of silence and mutual aid, identifying gestures, elaborate codes and secret rituals. Hermetic organizations (like the early Christians, Freemasons and weapon management) lend themselves to accusations of depraved conspiracy, whether or not they are true. They permit battle elites to indulge in their favorite perversions. Infiltrating secret societies with inbred skill, info elites persecute hermetics from above, corrupt them from within and slander them from below.

12. Bureaucratic lies: many bureaucrats justify their budget by withholding significant information. The more extensive their monopoly of information and the harder they make it to acquire, the more valuable they seem to be and the larger their bureaucracies may grow. Under intense pressure from special interests both private and corporate, bureaucracies adopt covert agendas that contradict their public mandate. Disguising this contradiction is a critical skill of civilian agencies in a weapon bureaucracy. Otherwise, their budget will shrink in favor of more direct weapons expenditure. 

Examples abound. Distorted “success statistics” come to mind from sequential prohibitions targeting drinkers and druggies, to unemployment counts (always reduced in official reports), to safety studies of atomic energy, to official reports of impending victory in Vietnam and elsewhere. 

In many instances of misinfo politics, bureaucrats conclude that their data tabulations create reality instead of merely quantifying it. Whatever statistics they crank out, that is reality as far as they are concerned.

Another common lying technique pegs “acceptable” levels of pollutants, crime and other negative fallouts at current levels and then sets “unacceptable” ones much higher. Current dosages may be toxic, but are certified tolerable or even raised in order to postpone corporate efforts to reduce them. Officially “acceptable” levels may mask a real threat until spectacular catastrophes force self-informed victims to raise the alarm at their own expense. Responsible officials may have been briefed on the problem beforehand, but they block new findings at every turn. They are rarely held accountable for subverting the truth, and often rewarded for doing so. 

Usually, those alarms are miraculously ignored by the press; the exact opposite of reactionary projects (Trump) unpardonably oversold. 

For example, just before the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown of 2011, the official level of tolerable background radiation was arbitrarily doubled. No‑one warned us that its ultimate consequence might be the end of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere. These are typical outcomes of runaway weapon technology: like the accidental discharge of a pistol during its cleaning, but on a massive scale.

There are other statistical distortions in current use. Many statistics are deliberately under- or over-reported or held back beyond their yearly due date, and then hugely revised years later. Many revisions down the road make the scientific interpretation of these numbers very problematic. Inaccurate predictions based on them lessen public trust and advance those who have something to hide.

The U.S. Congress has forbidden the tabulation of national statistics on deaths by firearms, as well as many other problematical findings. Problem solved…

Bureaucrats often trivialize the worst consequences of their policies. Their dismissal of unforeseen consequences can take the form of bad counts at the collection level, tampering by partisan intermediaries, and distortions at the top where unfavorable sub-categories are eliminated entirely. Favorable statistics are often accumulated using reverse techniques. The greater the pressure for specific results, the more distorted the official tallies. Anecdotal evidence, collected at the grass roots, often reveals local conditions more clearly than “scientific” compilations of official statistics. 

These numbers must pass through tiers of reviewing authorities, each isolated from the phenomenon tabulated and inclined to distort official results to suit its agenda, more and more so the higher up it goes. Finally, crafty statisticians can manipulate the figures to reach any conclusion their paymasters desire. 

It is easy for a weapon society to sweep unforeseen consequences under the rug, since we are convinced in advance that so many disasters of great scope are inevitable.

13. Lying by omission: reactionary candidates for public office and high judgeship have refused to clarify their take on controversial topics. Such evasions may not bear the stink of direct lies, but the right not to incriminate themselves does not compare to that of criminal suspects. After all, high office and public policy are at stake here, not mere criminal punishment. During a job interview, suspicion of unsuitability should be grounds for dismissal, as would a candidate’s tendency to cloak his prejudice. 

Otherwise, we will be overruled by wall-to-wall imitators of the current Supreme Court majority, reactionary to the core.

Of course, a complex system of checks and balances can only control a few deviants who refuse to act in good faith. No system will work when majorities embrace Conspiracies of Greed with gusto. Some overriding moral principle must come into play. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait for unforeseen consequences to blow all this manure away. Be warned: once the shit hits the fan, it won’t be pleasant downwind where we’ve been marooned.

People keep denying that bad behavior has nasty consequences and must be controlled for that reason. Idealism holds its ultimate reward, not for its own sake but because it produces better outcomes through the miracle of generosity. I am embarrassed to have to remind Learners of this obvious truth. A society that has to justify idealism against a majority opinion that rejects it has jammed its bearings: the current state of affairs.

 14. Meme-lies: some fanatics find their chosen dogma deeply satisfying, even though they may reflect unique circumstances and aspirations unsuitable for other people. To bolster their fragile ego, personal insecurity, powerlessness and low self-esteem, they force other people to accept their fanatical ideas, even if those ideas contradict those peoples’ perceived needs. If enough fanatics share this belief, they can become powerful enough to injure those who threaten them with disagreement. The more deeply held the belief and the more passionate the believers, (for example, the international community of nationalists at perpetual war with each other), the greater the likelihood of trouble. 

Honest practitioners of Satyagraha may overcome these paradoxes, of which more in its own chapters. 

15. Weapon mentality lies: we recite the same “truths” even though we know they are lies. Talented weapon mentors earn big bucks to refine, revise and re-broadcast these untruths endlessly. Effective dissidence is silenced – whatever the cost – until obvious lies replace the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth… Even if this kind of corruption takes a thousand years, even if it fosters untold social contradictions and mortal crises. 

16. Sports lies: as long as me and my friends can stick to sports babble, we can neglect monumental social problems. 

Injustice prevails when strangers can’t discuss serious issues without risking unforeseen violence. Sports babble becomes a magical incantation, a favored means to disarm hostility and sidetrack debate, the lowest common denominator of mutual irresponsibility. Any adult who holds back from critical thought and social activism is an idiot in the Greek sense of the term: an over-aged child. 

The mass media sustain this stupidity. They spoon-feed tepid pap to the info proletariat, withhold complex and controversial topics and replace them with insignificant spectacles. 

The other day, I sat down in two random taverns, wedged each time between wide-screen TVs and their blaring sports blather. In American airports, you cannot escape the roar and squeal of their cheap babble. It struck me that – in millions of identical places, just about the last ones allowed – the least significant data is transmitted every day for years on end. 

It is time we started reasoning like adults. We could begin by forcing the media to act like good bird dogs and retrieve our social truths in all their complexity.

17. Self-lies are the most insidious. They can take any form described above, but should be listed separately. 

You alone can correct a falsehood once it takes hold in your skull. Like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Tale, the victim of a self-lie must witness the painful after-effects of his delusion so he can detoxify (like losing a family member to the COVID whose danger he denies). This response wastes valuable time, demands great courage, can drag out the suffering of innocents and induce unbearable guilt in those who repent. Many never admit as much, but double and redouble their own lies instead.

How much would life improve if we prioritized the truth preemptively?

18. Lies by excluding the truth: When a big problem presents itself, the special interests in power exclude the practical response they oppose, and only advertise unacceptably extreme ones so as to maintain the official, lucrative if problem-riddled status quo (gun control in the USA, etc.). 

19. The simplifying lie of denial: “Whatever it is or might be, it can neither be true nor ever succeed. That did not just happen. That is false, no matter how true it sounds. That person cannot be what he claims to be; that other person is not corrupt and stupid but superior in every way. No matter what catastrophe we appear to be heading for, things will work out in the end without our getting involved.” For lack of any better response.

20. The lies of art and creativity: Ah! How much sadder life would be without them! Withdrawal from misery, Learners friends; as opposed to the “pursuit of happiness” of monied fantasy.

The first symptom of the Routine of Evil is the proliferation of Big Fat Lies. From a Learner standpoint, lying burns extra energy in a world where every joule should be smart-metered (a technology our shared ignorance forbids). It is degrading, insulting and vulgar; it leads to errors of reason and action. Like other forms of violence, lying takes more effort in the long run than does adhering to the truth. Without some massive form of self-delusion, it is difficult to embrace evil and still adhere to some semblance of the truth. So additional truthfulness could help us distinguish right from wrong. 

Knowledge is wealth; lying is theft. What would weapon mentality have you do? Do the opposite. 

Gandhi’s assertions were categorical. According to him, Good deeds, Truth and Non-violence are one and the same, each third reflecting the other two. Evil, Violence and Untruth are self-reinforcing aspects of the Cartesian illusion of human separation from the Universe. Lies, cruelty and power-hunger are just different flavors of violence. There is no such thing as a “small” lie” or “acceptable levels” of violence. May we embrace his wisdom!

He believed that people should make impossible demands on themselves in order to learn from their mistakes. According to him, politics offer the supreme challenge to moral beings: the same way tightrope walking offers more challenge than strolling down a boulevard. Heightened risk makes the business more interesting. Besides, who is supposed to run politics? Crooks?

He followed the path of supreme service and tragic optimism, the glorious path of Buddha and Jesus. Only superheroes would dare follow in their footsteps. We moral cowards must witness their dazzling trajectory crouched in our glowing embers of Hell. 

Momentary redemption may come about by establishing a Learner Commonwealth on PeaceWorld. As far as I can tell, only the promise of reincarnating in Christ, by the solitary way of the Our Father, could unseal the escape hatch to final redemption and pry it open enough to let every soul pass through, including those of Gandhi, Buddha and each of us.

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