This is a book about fantasies. Not the fantasies of a child at play, happily immersed in imaginary adventures, but adult fantasies where the game of 'Cops and Robbers' is played with real bullets and where trillions of dollars are spent pretending we are doing something about our multiplying problems.
Here, fantasies have consequences that threaten the individual, every nation and the species itself. These are the fantasies and delusions the institutions of our various cultures foist upon us and which we are taught to believe, act upon, preserve, and perpetuate. We are born into systems of myth, fantasy and shifting delusion, embracing them as our own, because we know none other.
The fantasies we deal with here are the natural outgrowth of emerging intelligent life and have their origins in the myths and delusions of primitive peoples. These ideas are alive and thriving within modern societies, transmitted and perpetuated by the institutions of our respective cultures.
These falsehoods provide the roots of endless misdirection and strife. They, together with the ignorance that invariably attends them, are the inevitable outgrowth of a fundamental conceptual pathogen underlying virtually all social problems and human conflict. This fundamental pathogenic concept would be common to any emerging intelligent live form when consciousness and conceptualization emergences in the absence of a body of accumulated knowledge. Ignorance demanding answers insures a delusional basis which distorts all subsequent perception and reasoning, resulting In a degenerative syndrome of belief-ignorance, the instillation of individual mental pathology..
Examine any functional problem in depth, individual or social, and you will quickly encounter misdirection based on defective premises. False premises result in both destructive activity and defective social systems. Falsehoods cause us to look at our world from a distorted perspective, and strongly influence the decisions we make, blunting lives and generating social strife.
Virtually all human behavior is learned. More than any other factor, human behavior reflects concepts and cultural tenets that have become internalized, be they truth or fallacy. Where they reflect reality, these ideas support individual and social effectiveness. Where they do not reflect reality, they invariably generate problems.
Cultural myths and fantasies are harmless so long as they are recognized as myths and fantasies. As belief, however, they distort perception and reasoning processes, generating drives to actualize systems and conditions that are contrary to the principles and processes of nature. Instilled delusion becomes a powerful tool for suppressing human mentality, suppressing reasoning within populations, making them more open to control and manipulation by our institutions and/or by unscrupulous individuals or special interests.
There is true and valuable knowledge transmitted by our cultures, nor should we discount the human amenities gained, such as a sense of unity and belonging engendered by one's culture. However, cultural myths and delusional concepts lead to institutionalized pathology, conceptual and functional disease carried and perpetuated by our social systems.
Distorting and denying reality, beliefs forever trap us into patterns of dishonesty, both in our thinking and in our activities. Integrity, effective systems and solutions to our problems do not, can not, issue from untruth.
Maintaining our cultures and our belief systems as sacrosanct has insulated the myths and falsehoods from critical examination and assignment to their proper place, that as artifacts of early human thought. Failure to question our beliefs has preserved the myths and superstitions of our cultures and within our own cognizance, down through the millennia, functioning to block social progress, preventing growth and correction within social systems.
The effectiveness of our institutions is damaged by delusion, both in terms of their own loss of effectiveness and by loss of respect by populations, as people increasingly recognize the fallacies and absence of institutional integrity.
Being forever at odds with natural functions, delusional premises generate conflicts and misdirection within the institutions, as well as among individuals and nations.
Regardless of the functional nature of an institution, it will not have escaped the pathogens of its origin. Our institutions, to the degree that they operate on defective premise structures, are the main transmitters of popular delusion and social dysfunction.
Our institutions maintain the myths and fantasies and manipulate populations through emotional hooks inherent in their systems of untruth. Thus, it is our controlling institutions that have affected an almost complete blockage of social progress within populations.
Fundamental beliefs as to the nature of existence provide the seeds from which all our other untruths and social dysfunctions grow. Their maintenance prevent a popular acceptance of reality and respect for fundamental factual knowledge relevant to the nature of the Cosmos, natural systems and the human animal.
Ignorance and misdirection has blocked human progress in every arena except those where we have been required to adhere to objective indices, where the effects of false premises are immediately felt and cannot be tolerated.
Circularly, cultural delusions infect the individual who then functions to support and maintain the irrationalities and dysfunction of our institutions, an insidious syndrome. Such dysfunction would develop in a society with an aware and critically reasoning public. People reflect what they have been taught, our social pathologies a reflection of what people learn, and fail to learn.
Carefully crafted propaganda, when believed, results in the individual supporting the misdirected causes and agendas of the institutions. Cultural delusion has ever been an inevitable aspect of human environments, neatly packaged and emotionally colored for mass appeal. Delusion is exhibited and proffered by our mightiest institutions, religious and governmental. All of our mainstream institutions support a popular collection of misinformation and myth, which varies and shifts with current environments and pressures, but moves no closer to reality.
False material, when internalized, blocks thought and inquiry and produces a barrier to the acceptance of real knowledge. It drastically reduces critical reasoning on the part of the citizen. Beliefs cannot be maintained in a reasoning environment. This absence of reasoning translates to public tolerance and support for, not just the myths, lies and stupidities, but the systems that spawn them.
Questions of truth or validity are strongly discouraged in a delusion-based culture. They are rarely raised. Our instituted systems do no tolerate such questioning. Any institutional discussion of basic premises is couched in sentiment and/or sacrosanctity, assuming and insisting upon the unquestioned acceptance of fundamental concepts.
A recognition by the public that existence has absolute and inviolable characteristics would greatly weaken our institutions' ability to use delusion as a means of control and exploitation.
Most people readily accept the institutionalized untruths and mandates, these ideas becoming the foundations of their own belief systems. Thus, falsehoods relative to the basic nature of existence become the foundations of premise structure upon which most of us operate, largely at the expense of our own autonomy, the best interests of our society, our species and Earth's capacity to support life.
What I am talking about here are cultural delusions which have lethal effects, keeping the real world hidden within a fog of diversionary rhetoric and distorted perception, making it impossible to recognize the real nature of our problems, and preventing corrective measures.
Within this fog of delusion, little is seen as it really is and the individual is manipulated, becoming not only a victim, but a vector of a species-blighting disease. We usually have some sense of the delusions, but few of us have a grasp of their enormity, how little of what we are taught represents a workable reflection of reality.
The bonds within which humanity struggles are largely invisible. The individual is given neither an understanding of the mechanisms and forces at work, nor the means of breaking free.
One of the most insidious aspects of cultural myths is that, once accepted, there is a desperate, inborn drive to protect and maintain them. They cause us to avoid and reject the very information necessary for insight, resulting in abysmal ignorance in the area of the belief.
From Poland to Pakistan, from Nicaragua to Beijing, there is a growing ground-swell of popular resistance to authoritarian and centralized governing systems, the most keenly felt of human oppressors. There is a growing global awareness that these gigantic systems are increasingly generating most of the problems. Yet, as increasing numbers of people struggle desperately to throw off the weight of such systems, groping blindly toward freedom, they are oblivious to what is required to create governing systems capable of self-correction or the changes that must take place within themselves. They are also oblivious to other parasitical systems which lay waiting to ensnare them.
Indeed, they have little awareness of what constitutes true freedom, but they have a growing sense of needing it. They recognize only that their institutional systems are decreasingly effective while growing more oppressive. There is a growing urgency to escape. Unfortunately, due to delusional premise structures, the awareness that something is wrong cannot provide insight into what is needed.
In any society, the greater numbers are ill-prepared for self-determined activity. They expect and exercise little personal autonomy. Few recognize the fact that large amounts of self determination is necessary for the health and effectiveness of the individual and the species. They continue to expect some system to solve their problems and make the uglies go away. They are unable to understand that no such system exists. In the Hollywood vernacular, the Cavalry, flags flying, is not going to appear on the horizon to save them.
The prerequisite for slipping the bonds of our cultural insanities and parasitical systems, allowing us to move toward real knowledge, real freedom and the ability to solve our problems, lies in people recognizing the extent to which their own cultural systems are flawed, and the reasons for this pathology. There needs to be increasing dissemination of factual material and discussion as to the real nature of existence, contrasting natural systems with human delusional systems. There also needs to be more information concerning the mechanisms that make such delusion possible. Cultures, governing institutions, religions and ethnic groups must cease to be sacrosanct, for these are the source and the conveyors of cultural delusion and resulting social dysfunction..
Correction requires recognizing factual realities, seeing the myths and fantasies for what they are. Only such insight will cause the individual to drop these ideas. Only when we begin to relinquish our belief in magic will we be motivated to accept reality and work with natural systems instead of against them. By understanding exactly what is wrong with existing systems, one is placed in a position to understand in which direction lies correction.
Our most pressing need, and most formidable underlying problem, is that of recognizing and accepting the fact that there are things fundamentally wrong with our own personal ideas and perceptions, which, in terms of the society, culminate in our present growing problems.
Only through recognizing the flaws within one's own cognizance, will individuals begin to correct, dropping the popular ideas that an insane world still desperately clings to, mindless of the dysfunction, dissipation of energy, and human suffering they generate and the global destruction they move us toward.
We cannot gain the status of a truly intelligent species until we are willing to break free of our stone-age cognitive heritage and the delusions it perpetuates. So far, human direction and collective activity remains no more effective than that of a colony of the simplest microbe, growing in numbers until we exceed and destroy the carrying capacity of our host.
There are all kinds of myths and fantasies: religious, political, economic, social, even scientific. A detailed categorization and classification of them is beyond the scope of this book. Nor is it needed at this time. What is needed is to begin to recognize the fundamental nature of our beliefs, those unfounded ideas and rules we cling to. We need to begin to become aware of nature's principles that are being ignored and violated.
Only when we come to recognize fundamental principles and accept the fact that there are things fundamentally wrong with our beliefs, our systems and our approaches, will we begin to focus on the real nature of problems, and begin to recognize and work within the parameters of possibility.
So long as our greater numbers believe in a magic universe, we will be unable to make fundamental corrections. The masses will continue to believe that anything is possible, deferring to authority and opting for idealized solutions.
Idealism is the first idea that should be trashed, the assumption that simply anything is possible. We cannot grasp the fallacy of this notion unless we gain some understanding of fundamental existence, that the parts and pieces fit together and relate only in certain ways and under certain conditions. We need to have a general understanding of how systems develop and why. We come to understand what cannot exist when we gain an recognition of the nature of what does exist.
The problem is circular, the delusion mandating the ignorance, the ignorance allowing support for the delusion. Until we accept the fundamental realities of existence, we will continue to believe in magic. An absence of this basic understanding of how the universe works severely limits one's perspective and the ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy.
Gaining a basic understanding of nature is both the easiest and the hardest part. The information is easily understood and can be quickly gained, but exposure to it will pop the bubble of many of our beliefs. One can maintain beliefs only by avoiding real information and critical reasoning in the area of the belief.
If you keep reading you will have a fair understanding of fundamental existence by the time you finish Chapter 2. But, if you recognize the reality of it, accepting that knowledge, gaining insight, it will be at the expense of destroying any reciprocal belief.
Threatening a belief is not comfortable. Changing one's view can, indeed, be disconcerting. Where delusion is the norm, truth and rationality are seen as radical. You can expect resistance, internally and externally.
A fantasy is usually thought of as a scenario an individual knows is untrue, at least on a deeper level, but maintains for some personal gratification it brings.
Within our own society, a large percentage of the population realize that most of our cherished ideas and premises are untrue, but support them, never the less. The acceptance of our cultural fantasies range from grudged and marginal tolerance to blind, fanatic and evangelistic faith.
For a large segment of the world's human population, cultural myths and fantasies constitute psychosis, a predominant immersion in belief, where reality is denied and the ability to distinguish the real from the fantasy is lost.
Those individuals who fervently embrace large areas of institutionalized belief are invariably the least functional within their societies and the world community. They comprise a class which may well pull down civilization and send humanity back into a condition of primitive savagery, with life at a level of bare subsistence, for the survivors. In any society, because of the profusion of misinformation, false material is accepted as natural. Yet, in every society, false material is destructive in its effects. We live in cultures where everybody lies to some degree.
Indeed, our systems are so corrupt that one is required to lie in order to live within them, blunting individual integrity and seriously compromising the ability of systems to be useful. Governmental coercion results in our obeying laws that are counter to human effectiveness and forces our complicity in the dissemination of propaganda and in the perpetuation of diverse disorder.
In every society, there are cultural imperatives to lie. You are strongly pressured to accept and believe false information. You are strongly dissuaded from questioning the beliefs of others or the system. You are pressured to lie to your children, to the authorities, to your associates and, worst of all, to yourself.
You are lied to by your parents, your peers, your authorities, your institutions and, of course, the media. You are constantly bombarded and live your life immersed in lies. It is a testament to the good stuff Homo sapiens is made of, living in such a quagmire, that humankind is left with any capacity for, or acceptance of, the realities which lie all but hidden among the weeds of cultural delusion.
There is an unspoken code which mandates that you support the delusions of others, at least to the degree that you do not pose a serious threat to them. Supporting one another's delusions is considered to be socially gracious, being considerate.
You are discouraged from talking about anything that will illuminate a flaw in another's belief. Punishment for such transgression comes swiftly from both the person whose cherished belief is threatened, and the group or the institution, should you gain their attention.
Many people believe that society's fantasies are harmless, if not actually helpful. Such thinking creates a safe haven for many seemingly innocuous myths and fantasy systems, lessening the pressure to discard them and move on. Many of our most cherished fantasies have not only wide-spread acceptance on this basis but attract a large percentage of the population as active supporters.
Such popular support tends to discourage open questioning and criticism of delusional material and the production of factual material to the contrary. Few would buck the rushing and angry waters of popular opinion, especially when it is whipped to a maelstrom by unseen but powerful and virulent forces within the a society. In the United States, we have become a nation who's credo is: `If you want to get along, go along.' However, with increased communication, this, too, is changing.
Delusion and ignorance are inextricable, the former insuring the latter, both incompatible with integrity and effective human function.
When fantasies are true delusions, that is, when they are accepted as reality, and especially where there is a large amount of institutional interest in maintaining such beliefs, they become used as puppet strings and invariably serve as a means of control and manipulation.
Belief distorts our mental processes in startling ways, distorting our perceptions and our reasoning to the point of coloring our every view and driving us in endlessly adversarial directions. They can cause an individual to hallucinate and interpret any event as proof of the validity of the fantasy. Even at the most superficial levels of accommodation, they have the power to galvanize us into action, invariably in the wrong direction.
Fantasies effectively prevent our finding solutions to the growing number of civilization-threatening problems with which humanity is confronted. They are the reasons human progress has been limited almost exclusively to science and technology, as the fantasies prevent us from recognizing or addressing the problems pertaining to human conditions or our social systems.
Beliefs have severely detrimental effects upon our life and the lives of our children, becoming serious barriers to learning by setting up rejection reflexes to factual knowledge in the areas of belief. Ultimately, they threaten, not only our quality of life as individuals, but the ability of the species to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
In the support of cultural delusion and fantasies, encouraging distorted reasoning, the mass media constitutes one of our chief culprits. The mass media is invariably the carrier of institutional propaganda. The reality distortions and misinformation which streams from the various media is unending. Most media types appear to have an affinity for reality like oil has for water. They instinctively abhor the real nature of things and opt for distortions, opinions and fantasies, putting their own twist of sensationalism and/or contention on every story. Their primary focus is upon generating emotionality, especially the stronger emotions of fear and anger. They fan the embers of conflict.
Their underlying agenda, of course, is upon maximizing market share, regardless of the damage they do to the society. It is a rarity, if not an impossibility, to find a news story that has not seriously distorted the facts. The various media freely manipulate your emotions, at the expense of your reasoning. Too often truth is not only not required, it is not welcome or even tolerated.
Populations demanding the truth would cut drastically into the ability of the media to sensationalize and distort. Its detrimental effects would be largely neutralized. Under the present rules of the game, however, ultimate reality is not recognized. Modern humanity has embraced the social philosophy of Relativism, wherein existence is seen as nebulous, where everything is tenuous and the idea of the absolute is not tolerated.
Within our cultures, all are deluded to some degree, this especially includes the deluders. For any action there will be a rationalization. In every sector, every institution, the sources of power patronize the fantasies at the expense of truth and human effectiveness. Nowhere in our controlling institutions does one find leaders who recognize the fundamental nature of existence or of our species. All ascribe to the magic universe delusion and labor to maintain the cultural delusions and the systems that spawn them.
There is virtually no forum for reality and truth in ours, or any other culture. Not in our media. Not in our institutions. Not among ourselves. Only marginally within science. However, the Internet has the potential for changing this.
The media plays to the greater numbers. They thrash, trash, sensationalize and distort, a thundering herd in an unabashed scramble for attention. Necessary as the quest for ratings is, it is pursued in the service of the institutions, not the correction of the institutions. The fundamental delusions and flawed principles are carefully avoided.
Within human societies, a popular stand will be popular because it serves the interests of one or more of our cultural institutions. If it does not, it will be suppressed by the institutions and the media. In such an environment, any popular perception can be expected to be seriously at odds with factual reality.
Present media tactics result in the mediocre being given sway over the higher value or quality, perception given precedence over the factual. The first priority of the media is to titillate the multitude, to hype conflict and manipulate perception. The fears, anger and frustration of the masses are played upon like the strings of a harp.
Conflict, trivia and sensationalism are generated or emphasized at the expense of issues, factual information and principles. Fundamental principles and premises are not touched. Unpopular questions are avoided at all costs, unless they are being used for the purpose of character assassination. Where a public figure cannot be faulted by what he or she is saying, one can count on a personal attack in an attempt to destroy credibility. Typically, there isn't even a pretense at objectivity or rational thought on the part of the media, just go for the jugular. Witness the continued press to destroy President Clinton, by the media and Congress, in the throes religious indignation, and in the absence of anything he could be charged with, and with the bogus tactic of getting him to lie to a question Congress had no right to ask.
What no one bothered to recognize was that everyone, including the President of the United States, has a personal life. His sexual prerogatives, what ever they be, are simply not anyone's business. They are an aspect of his personal life, even within the Oval Office. Certainly that office has been used for far less noble activities.
In the avoidance of addressing reality or its underlying principles, the most common tactic used by the media is to evade the question while punishing the source. Typically, hard questions are edited out while the source is attacked. Questions that get too close to reality have a tendency to die on the lips of the offender.
Cultures and ethnic groups are held sacrosanct by all cultural institutions. These are areas that have been completely insulated from critical examination and discussion. The news media's reaction to any uncomfortable questions in these areas will be to immediately move to destroy the source of such sacrilege. In the process, the real problem is avoided and insulated from examination. It continues to grow and fester, as do the frustrations, resentments and hatreds the problem generates.
Every excess is excused under the "people's right to know". Yet, the question of why the people have a right to know is never addressed. The people do have a right to know, a natural right to know, the truth, about anything that impinges upon their own lives. They need to know the realities, and the principles of those realities. If they don't understand the realities, they can't accept the realities.
The people have a right to know because of a need to adjust and make corrections. If the nature of a problem is not understood, one cannot formulate a solution. The need is for real knowledge. If an individual, or a society of individuals, does not understand the causes and effects of their environment, they cannot make corrections or repairs.
The people do not have a right to intrude into areas that pertain only to an individual or a voluntary group of individuals. Paraphrasing Will Rogers, "The right to swing ones's arm ends at the other fella's nose."
Every functional human problem reflects delusion and its reciprocal ignorance. It reflects an absence of real knowledge. The news media bears the greatest culpability for this condition, sense it is the media which gathers the news, compiles the news, reports the news and most seriously affects the educational programming of a population. The end products of the mass media imparts precious little real knowledge, but relentless and deliberate distortion, diversion, delusion and demagoguery.
There is no search for existing realities, causes or nature's principles. There is a complete absence of investigative reporting that would shed light on the roots of our cultural pathologies, that would attack an institution or display our distorted premises. One can find precious little intellectual integrity within any culture, largely because it is not characteristic of our institutions and, it would appear, virtually non-existent within the mass media.
The permeation of untruth in our society is so complete, seemingly having reached a point of critical mass, that the people, as well as the deluding sources of power, our leaders and institutions, have accepted misinformation as normal, proper and necessary.
None of our `movers and shakers' are seemingly aware that the seeds of destruction they sow will soon destroy their own environments. None realize that untrue material is the ultimate source of personal and social pathology that will ultimately lay waste their own world as all increasingly reap the harvest of mindlessness.
None recognize the fact that the masses can no longer be maintained in ignorance and superstition, in mindless emotional frenzy, without destroying civilization's infrastructure of knowledge and productive systems; without destroying the world of the upper social strata as well as that of the masses.
From the moment of birth, each of us are carefully taught a multiplicity of untrue material. The fact that fantasies permeate every aspect of our society insures this. The delusion is proffered or echoed by every institution.
None of us have completely escaped this fantasy environment, nor the pathology it generates. We were too young when the process began and the fantasies have been too consistent and all-pervasive. As individuals, the only remedy is to begin asserting independence, to become cognizant of one's own delusions and replace them with knowledge. In a tolerant environment, this process tends to occur naturally, the voids being replaced with knowledge as the delusions drop away. The dropping of belief, in favor of reciprocal knowledge and understanding, provides a shield against the emotional hooks and controls of culture.
The teaching and reinforcement of false material will continue for as long as the institutions are allowed to disseminate it. We should count ourselves lucky if, in our lifetime, we are able to significantly reduce the amount of propaganda that pours over us. However, such material has its greatest effects upon the unwary. If we understand its nature, we largely neutralize the detrimental effects.
People are great kidders. Unfortunately, the thing they are best at is kidding themselves. They live, to a large degree, in their own individual worlds of make-believe. They belong to no groups free of its own set of delusions, which are told and believed, embellished and passed on. The individual is bombarded with false material and distorted reasoning from the moment of birth and, by maturity, is left with little recognition of, or capacity for, truth as portrayed by the real cosmos. The individual lives with lies and by lies, and is free of them only in death.
Few are able to differentiate between opinion and knowledge; between groundless theories and evidence-supported premises. They have not been taught to think critically and to question authority. They have had to repress critical reasoning in order to keep the faith. The typical individual, in any culture, has little concern for truth, becoming cynical and grappling endlessly with his or her own beliefs, distorting perception and reasoning in a continuing struggle to make the pieces fit. Few dare discriminate between knowing and believing. Those who cannot are malleable and vulnerable to the chaos of propaganda and opinion poured over them.
Government, in addition to issuing its own propaganda, serves to force and/or coerce adherence to additional cultural fantasy systems and to support other institutionalized dogma, such as religion. Government officials typically view the public in terms of management, control and manipulation. Governing functionaries do not view the public in terms enhancing individual or social functionality, but as an adversarial resource to be managed and exploited. The primary objective is that of maintaining and enhancing governmental interests.
The Internet's potential for placing unfiltered knowledge in the hands of the individual is frightening to any authoritarian official. However, there are a few leaders who have glimpsed some fundamental realities. Newt Gingrich, even with his religious imperatives, recognized, as do many conservatives, the necessity for fiscal integrity.
But Gingrich was different. He truly wanted to make some fundamental changes. This kind of leader has an additional handicap, they really do change things. There is something more to them than hypocracy and rhetoric. Gingrich recognized that excessive governing was destroying the effectiveness of the society, especially the productive elements. He moved to balance the budget and cut the expense of governing. He and his team began to make real changes. This frightened a highly deluded public with little or no sense of ultimate physical realities. This fear was hyped by the media and the political opposition, derailing the only significant change of the nineties.
A population immersed in cultural fantasies is more vulnerable to manipulation than a rational people. Maintaining a functionally demented society serves to reduce resistance to further governmental intrusion and growth. Muddled or suppressed thinking on the part of a people enhances government's ability to increase its rate of growth and reduce meaningful protest. As the public becomes more irrational, not only does it lose its sense of reality, but becomes more dependent, unruly and helpless, which is used to justify increased governing and maintenance, a degenerative syndrome. The public increasingly clings to the oppressor, demanding to be taken care of.
It is for this reason that government in the United States, at all levels, is spreading like a cancer. Much of its insidious growth goes unnoticed, consisting of increased rules, regulations, jurisdiction, and riders attached to legislation. It is a government's propensity to garner as much power and control as possible that becomes the unifying commonality among all forms of government.
As the public becomes more confused and helpless, unrestrained government increasingly takes over the life of the individual and moves toward the actualization of a totalitarian state.
Public education, in the United States, is an appendage of government. It educates in support of our cultural delusions, toward an orientation to Authority, belief, and allegiance to existing systems. It functions to indoctrinate toward the support and perpetuation of a culture's institutions. Public education serves to continue the delusion instilling processes began in the home. In general, it reinforces the delusions and makes real learning a punishing activity.
It supports the cultural myths and fantasies and continues to reinforce these delusions. Public education tends to squelch natural curiosity and the questioning of social dogma. It inevitably encourages irrational goals and instills biases toward the accommodation of our institutionalized delusions and stupidities.
Public Education in the U.S. also reflects the abuses of unionism, becoming a self-serving system of process, not product. In this process, decreasing amounts of education costs more. It is a system where teaching is endless process, where teachers pretend to teach and students pretend to learn, neither sensing an ultimate reality.
Public Education actually reduces the student's ability to react to false teachings and conditions by reinforcing false premise structures and reasoning patterns that provide only
an imagined facility in dealing with problems. It recognizes no absolutes in existence and teaches none, providing no enduring referents for the student.
Its product is increasingly unfit for a technological society or for an effective democracy, which depends upon a predominately rational, objective electorate for its only impetus toward self-correction.
Private education is lost in a similar miasma, instilling its own irrational cultural perspectives, reflecting how completely cultural fantasies permeate and distort public perception.
The arts and sciences are also adulterated in the maintenance of much of the basic fantasy structure. The whole realm of the Arts is forever being used as an instrument for the portrayal of mindlessness and a magic universe. Music, in terms of the thought content it conveys through popular lyrics, is also unwittingly the servant of irrationality. Artists and songwriters are among the least likely to understand the nature of problems or how things work. They express their ignorance, superstitions and distorted reasoning in their songs. Other art forms also reflect the population's level of delusion. The artists become the unwitting disseminators of misconception and irrationality, often producing gold plated manure that is without value or of negative value in terms of its effects upon the public.
Science is encouraged to accommodate the cultural fantasies, necessitating groundless premises, limited reasoning patterns and the formulation of tautological premises adrift from factual reality. Although less affected by cultural delusion than other areas and cultural structures, science does not escape its influence.
The mentally damaged masses enthusiastically join in the process, propagating and proliferating public dementia. This virulent syndrome is self-generating and self-reinforcing. In all cases, the pathology, ultimately, has its roots in belief, the acceptance of ideas in the absence of supporting evidence.
The dynamics of our social systems are easy to understand and easy to follow, once one recognizes the fundamental delusions. The difficulty lies in recognizing the enormity of their cumulative pathology and the devastating effects cultural delusion has on our mental processes and our approaches to problems. We have no untainted standard of comparison and have been taught to avoid comparisons that might lead to effective discrimination. In other words, we are encouraged to view the whole sad, sick mess as something normal and inevitable.
Hidden within this fog, the real principles and requirements of social functionality remain, the character of which we have not been taught and to which our ignorance and false beliefs renders us virtually blind.
One natural factor contributing to problems and the proliferation of propaganda lies in the nature of cultural institutions, themselves. Any organized or institutionalized
group takes on a life of its own. It has the power and the propensity. The organized structure survives individual minions and exerts powerful forces upon the individual within the organization. It is no longer confined to the characteristics of those in immediate control and always has a propensity to serve its own systems, often to the detriment of the public.
Institutions become self-perpetuating, their offices and systems operated by a succession of temporary functionaries bent on embellishing their own short tenures and whose reasoning and behavior have been largely shaped by the organization.
Institutional bureaucracy generates massive amounts of inertia, its moves reflecting the consensus of committees and the routine of accepted procedures. In the process, its integrity and rationality becomes but a shadowy vestige of that of its individual functionaries.
The organization moves as something alive, having a drive of its own, to grow and expand its sphere of influence, unhampered by any intrinsic mandate for objective rationality or integrity, in contrast to such as found in the individual.
To my knowledge, no organization in today's world has adopted objective rationality as a constitutional mandate, yet such rationality is necessary if the organization is to function as a positive force within a society, not being in some way at odds with social functionality.
No existing organization is likely to have true rationality as an operational directive, if for no other reason than that no one seems to understand its roots and how to achieve it. Rationality and a truth or reality-reflecting ethos is generated only as traits of individuals. It is a function born of knowledge and intellectual integrity, the recognition of the requirements for social functionality .
Such rationality, rare as it may be, can be found in organizational operations. However, it is usually a pale reflection of its source. Significant amounts of rationality, above that necessary for effective operation, is usually limited to organizations outside the realm of government, often under the direction of one individual.
Private organizations tend to be more ethical than governmental because they have to hue to the realities of the marketplace. Governmental committees tend to have trouble with reality. Their motives are elsewhere, such as maintaining the support of their constituents. They characteristically do not move significantly beyond this point.
We have alluded to the natural autonomy of every organism, including (and especially) the human animal, and the necessity for large measures of individual autonomy. The individual's health, reality-orientation and functionality is dependent upon it. If the individual needs so much autonomy, what then, is to become of the group and the institution?
Self-determination is fine and well for the individual but does this not detract from the functionality of the group, the organization or the species? This question expresses a non-problem, but is often proffered as a rationale to discourage individual autonomy. In the United States, the most productive periods have been accompanied by high levels of individual autonomy and personal responsibility for all essential human needs, with relatively low levels of interference, governmental or otherwise.
During these periods, the individual and private organizations pursued their own interests, often having little or no governmental maintenance or protection. The history of the U.S. has been driven, to a large extent, by freedom to exercise independent determination and drives. If you want a glimpse of life for the common man in an era of relatively little government, find a copy of a turn-of-the-century Sears & Roebuck catalog. The variety and prices of goods, delivered in massive quantities, displays an environment in which both the individual and the organization thrived.
To the degree that false premises exist, individuals will opt for emotional and delusional determinations and their effectiveness will be seriously impaired. Irrationality invariably reflects beliefs, invalid ideas. This is something quite different from the behavior of an objectively rational individual who demands neither anarchy nor unlimited freedom, but who insists on effective controls that do not oppress.
It should be recognized that nature holds no contradictions. Serving the individual strengthens the group. Serving the needs of the individual is serving the needs of the group. Indeed, all that a group possesses flows from the individual. It all begins with, and ultimately depends upon, the individual. The high point in species evolution is reached by individuals and, as the species degenerates, it is individuals who are degenerating, dragging productive systems down as they go.
In fact, you cannot fulfill the needs of the group or the species unless you do provide for the needs of the individual, the real needs of the individual, which includes providing reality reflecting information and portraying the real nature of problems and, thus, providing the possibility of dealing with those problems.
The functionality of the species depends upon the functionality of large numbers of individual members. The species will thrive only to the degree that individual members are able to thrive.
We hear a lot about `human rights' and there is much activity on the part of politicians in their pursuit of the preservation of civil rights, public safety, the general welfare, etc. This concern for the human animal would appear laudable were it not for the fact that the individual and, ultimately, the public, encounters its greatest threat in government involvement in areas that reduce individual function.
It can be noted that the cry for human rights, too often, serves as little more than a smoke screen behind which the individual serves as grist for the mill of government. In the name of 'general welfare' or 'public safety' or 'consumer advocacy', unlimited governmental involvement, growth and intrusion can be rationalized, the individual's autonomy and ability to function vanishing in the process. In the name of 'humanity' an endless number of symptoms may be treated while the underlying pathologies grow on the efforts.
What is carefully not being fought for is individual autonomy and the protection of property rights. If individual autonomy and property rights are protected (and you can't really separate the two), the problem of human rights takes care of itself. But, you see, our authorities are less than enthusiastic in their fight for individual autonomy and property rights, because the individual whose natural rights are protected is not nearly as easy to delude, manipulate or to exploit. In addition, such an individual is more rational, reducing the need for governmental intrusion.
High levels of personal autonomy and property rights would provide protection for the productive individual against those seeking unearned income and against governmental extortion.
The needs of the many do not outweigh the needs of the few, or the one (Spock was mistaken here). The reality, of course, is just the opposite, that the needs of the many can be met only if the needs of the individual are reasonably met. More accurately, only if the individual has the autonomy and environment to provide for his or her own needs. The group becomes stronger and more functional as its individual members grow in strength and functionality. The group or the organization becomes more rational only to the degree that its individual members become more rational.
What you are watching, in the deterioration of your society, are the effects of government progressively stripping away personal autonomy. As governments gain more power and populations become more controlled by institutional propaganda, regulations, laws and force, the individual loses commensurate autonomy and functionality. The individual becomes more dependent, angry, apathetic and irrational. More governing is rationalized, further reducing individual autonomy, further destroying individual effectiveness. The problem feeds upon itself and, as populations and governments grow, the problem is compounded and accelerates.
Individual decompensation insures commensurate governmental growth, ever-increasing force, police power, courts and jails, for the suppression of the natural effects of anger, frustration and diminishing mentality. Government, remaining locked into a positions of denial, has no means of making corrections. The public is served more of what generated the problems in the first place.
The altruistic belief that the individual should be sacrificed for the benefit of the group is one of our most lethal myths. It insures the ultimate destruction of a society. A society's ability to solve problems vanishes as focus swings from a sharp view of the individual to a diffused view of the masses. Dealing with social problems, which have the nature of growing exponentially, cannot be centralized nor effectively dealt with by any governmental entity that ignores the fundamental parameters and principles of nature.
For modern societies to effectively deal with the myriad problems with which they are increasingly confronted, autonomy and responsibility must be returned to individuals. This is essential to individual rationality and human effectiveness.
The more restrictions placed upon the individual, the less personal autonomy remains and, proportionally, the less functional the individual becomes. As personal autonomy and responsibility is usurped by government, dependency increases.
Conversely, as individual responsibility and determination is exercised, individual objective rationality and effectiveness increases. Internal controls accomplish far more than imposed control, legislation, rules or regulations ever can. The individual, growing in rationality, begins to pursue activities which give life more meaning and is decreasingly hampered by dependent and addictive behavior.
Cigarette butts become less of a problem and beer cans don't get thrown from car windows. Children get scrubbed until they shine and little old ladies get helped across the street. In short, things get done.
America has experienced a severe decrease in average individual autonomy and functionality during the latter half of this century. This loss of functionality expresses itself in increased dependence upon authority, decreasing factual knowledge, loss of sensitivity to others, rampant criminality, addictive behaviors, blindness to the real nature of problems and, in general, a marked degeneration among the greater numbers. That our groups and institutions reflect the same degeneration is inevitable. After all, this is a democracy.
The problem itself, as is the case with most problems, points the way to its own solution. The basic needs of humanity are objective. They concern themselves with measures and means necessary for the survival, effectiveness and positive growth of the species, and are not matters of opinion. Human survival and real progress depends upon real stuff and specific activities. The mandates of existence cannot be abridged by dogma, governmental proclamation or a fantasized interpretation of the universe. Nothing is more persistent than reality. You cannot make it go away. If you turn your back, it gets you in the end.
The struggle to stave off species degeneration will be a struggle between the individual and our institutions. However, this cannot be a war to destroy the institutions. This is required to be a process of education, to build, not destroy. Delusion cannot be destroyed by force. It must be dissolved by insight, which can come only as a by-product of factual education, an orientation to realty.
One is hard pressed to find any popular or institutionalized credo or belief that will stand close inspection. We live in a fog of cultural illusion and delusion, accepted without question and maintained by the vested interests of individuals and the institutions of our cultures. Yet, we internalize this insanity and it becomes the premise structure of our individual cognizance.
The kinds of things you have come to believe, whether they be reality or fantasy, determine the kind of person you have become. More than any other single factor, a human being reflects the ideas that have been internalized. These ideas determine one's perception. Perception determines ones behavior. Nowhere are the pathogenic effects of fantasies more clearly illustrated than in behavioral manifestations.
Computers do marvelous things, handling information at speeds far greater than the human mind, determining, controlling, guiding space craft, helping to design other computers, lifting the burdens of labor from humanity. All of this sophisticated processing and logic results from the program a computer is running. The quality of the output depends upon the quality of the input, garbage in - garbage out. Yet, we consistently program our children and the nation's citizens with delusional material, insuring that the reciprocal reality-reflecting knowledge will be rejected.
Human mentality, like the computer, is built up out of base-two arithmetic. This is a simple yes or no, one or zero, on or off. The whole of human mentality is made up of countless little decisions along these same lines, the acceptance or rejection of myriad fragments of information; the triggering or not triggering of responses, pathways, neurons, etc. The finest gradations of perception, of shading, tone and sentiment, are arrived at through the culmination of the mind's response to unimaginably large numbers of factors, in terms of accept/reject, the firing or not firing of neurons. This is the foundation of all discrimination, categorization and calculation by the human mind; our perception and reasoning. Discrimination, in terms of this base two dichotomy, is the basic principle of intelligence, and of existence itself.
Even in terms of the answer to humanity's ultimate question, that of survival, the answer will be determined in terms of countless choices by individuals, having a net effect for the species, either toward survival or toward degeneration. The whole spectrum of human behavior can logically be viewed and categorized in terms of the net effect of ideas which do or do not reflect factual reality.
Humanity's survival depends upon the ability to recognize and adapt to the realities. The question of survival has reached level of complexity that cannot be answered emotionality, nor through an instinctual drive for survival. Activities leading to the continued well-being of the species, if they are to come, must increasingly be reasoned activities. They must be engineered.
If we are to survive and continue positive development, the journey must be made on the wings of rational intellect. It will require ever-increasing levels of intelligence, factual knowledge and the ability to reason. Without all three, this human experiment will soon fail. Our defective premises and systems will kill it.
The degree to which a functional intellect and popular rationality is to be achieved will be at the expense of cultural delusions. The two cannot co-exist. They are mutually exclusive.
Although I am writing from the perspective of an American citizen, the principles discussed here are not limited to this society. These principles do not have a cultural or national exclusivity, nor are they the exclusive property of any individual. They are based upon objective reality and, although my description may be flawed, limited, or distorted, the corresponding realities will remain, for anyone to discover, to accept or reject. They are not even exclusive to our species. They are universal and apply to intelligent life and existence anywhere. Most of this material can be objectively validated and is beyond the realm of opinion. Most of it is self-evident. The principles exist for us to use or to ignore, with respective consequences.
Cultural fantasies motivate people and are used as a means of control by the institutions of every society. On the average, they increasingly have a negative effect and are detrimental to the stability of the society and the survival of the species. They prevent reality-orientation and rationality. They cloud issues, mask the real nature of problems and send us off in wrong directions. They act as barriers to learning, to correction and to progress.
Most of our fantasies are culturally based and culturally transmitted. That is, they are firmly entrenched in the culture and its institutions and have long histories of continued acceptance and usage. Many fantasies are generated and instilled as an on-going process. All are bolstered and maintained by vested interests. They cover the complete range of human activity. They are pathological as surely as if they were germs, lethal genes or carcinogens.
Collectively, cultural fantasies constitute the most devastating malignancy of the human species. They may well result in our precipitous dissolution as intelligent life. Should this be the case, our demise will have been most curious and pitifully stupid: Death by Fantasy.
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