The Dissemination of Information in Technological Society: Part 3
"Expert" credibility collapse and a criticism of modern education
Continued from Part 2…
This part looks at the gap between government approved experts/institutions and the results deriving from their guidance, concluding that they seek to increase and perpetuate problems - not solve them - for their own benefit. Mass belief in such experts and institutions derives from the Dewey education system which outputs compliant, unthinking corporate workers for easy exploitation by the system. This, in turn, contributes to the masses as a gray blob of undifferentiated NPCs.
GOVERNMENT APPROVED EXPERTS AND INSTITUTIONS KEEP THE MASSES PACIFIED
Westerners are taught that we live in a highly specialized, complex society and we should focus on our specialized skillset and leave medical, psychological and public policy matters to government sanctioned experts. To do self-research into matters is inevitably going to result in poor decision making because we lack the formal education, specialized knowledge and board approval to reach proper conclusions.
Yet if we judge a tree by the fruit it bears, this reliance on experts has been disastrous.
Americans are the most obese they’ve ever been despite following health expert recommendations with food pyramid, low-fat dietary recommendations.
They are sicker than they’ve ever been with allergies, autism, and a host of other diseases at all-time highs, despite the childhood vaccination schedule tripling in the past 40 years (from 23 doses in 1983 to 74 doses in 2016). Data shows if a person takes the full CDC vaccination schedule that person is 10x more likely to be sick and much more likely to get COVID.
Mental health issues are at historic highs despite the prevalence of psychologists and psychiatrists and freely issued SSRIs.
Despite putting much of the country on cholesterol lowering medications new studies show that high LDL is actually a good thing. The most important lipid marker with the clearest correlation of heart attack risk is the triglyceride to HDL ratio where a ratio over 3.5 gives a 16x the heart attack risk as those in the lowest group, and this ratio is entirely ignored by medical doctors.
Statins, which are handed out like candy to society, apparently do nothing.1
After decades of sunscreen use the FDA now warns it’s bad for your health — to what extent is unknown.
With medical doctors constantly warning about the health dangers of red meat consumption is it a surprise that Hong Kong, which has the world’s highest meat consumption, also has the longest lifespans in the world? And India, with the second lowest per capita meat consumption in the world has a life expectancy of 68.3 years?
The preventative side of medicine and diet is an absolute joke. How can one trust medical experts when it comes to how to live?
Medical education is a disaster for aspiring doctors as testing standards have been eviscerated in order to equalize the outcomes for blacks and other non-whites. These aspiring doctors spend an inordinate amount of time learning woke dogma instead of medicine, and even medical studies are not allowed without significant non-white test recipients (per the above link, “The NIH insists that participants in drug trials must also match national or local demographics. If a cancer center is in an area with few minorities, the lab must nevertheless present a plan for recruiting them into its study, regardless of their local unavailability.”)
The medical intervention side isn’t much better.
Despite being the first-line option to treat cancer, chemotherapy adds only 2% to the 5-year survival rate of cancer patients according to a 2004 study.
Hospital errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States.
Surgery for blocked arteries is often unwarranted according to the New York Times.
Goldman Sachs has questioned whether curing diseases is a sustainable business model as it’s much more profitable to manage diseases on a longterm basis instead of curing afflictions. It’s the same subscription model logic that has BMW requiring subscriptions to heat car seats and why air conditioning and heating is designed with a limited shelf-life “programmed obsolescence” when models fifty years ago would last forever. Would we even know if there was a cheap cancer cure as the medical complex would shelve it to keep profits high (could this be one?)? Or how about Pfizer burying a drug that lowered the risk of Alheizmers by 70%? Does ADHD drugs such as Adderall, handed out to children like candy, cause Parkinson’s after adulthood? Perhaps the AMA has already crushed a potential cure for cancer?
Let’s look at the medical establishment’s response to the COVID narrative. Early indicators at the start of the so-called pandemic showed that COVID was dangerous only for the elderly. On the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February 2020 (a month before the panic started in March), of the 3,711 people on board the ship at least 705 tested positive for the virus and 7 died, all of whom were more than 70 years old.
Physician-scientist John Ioannidis warned in March 2020 about the lack of evidence for the deadliness of COVID, which turned out to be even lower than he suggested. Was that < 1% mortality rate worth shutting down the world's economy with zero economic impact studies? The government could have told old and at-risk people to shelter at home. But the official medical and public health experts morphed their public messaging, haphazardly or intentionally, to push for predetermined political outcomes all in the name of “science”. Relying on the CDC and Dr. Fauci, the messaging went from:
COVID isn’t a concern and air travel from abroad should not be shut down. The media was hysterical over Trump’s “racism” for trying to shut down international air travel; to
Hysterical demands for a "two week [nationwide shutdown] to stop the spread”, while conducting unscientific and hasty medical decisions. Examples include purchasing 7,000 ventilators in New York City alone that substantially increased mortality (New York reported as many as 80% of people infected with the virus died after being placed on ventilation!), a frontline treatment of Remdesivir which killed massive amounts of people, pushing hospital monetary incentives to alter “died with COVID” to “died of COVID” to assist in creating public panic, forcing population-wide mask use including of small children despite extensive existing studies and data showing that mask use does not decrease infection rates; to
instituting indefinite nationwide lockdowns, despite a lack of economic impact studies; to
a rollout of untested mRNA vaccines with a promise that it was “95% effective” against COVID, applying relentless pressure on the public to comply including threats of job loss and travel and even the ability to enter stores.
Lord Fauci, the priest diviner of COVID, telling the faithful the latest revelation: COVID vaccines were 95% effective. Hallelujah! Pfizer and Moderna had removed the control groups in their studies, and the rollouts were conducted in record-breaking time with incomplete trials despite every mRNA vaccine trial since the 1980s having been terminated early due to excessive side effects and pathogenic priming, to
Everyones needs a booster, or multiple (indefinite?) boosters, because the COVID vaccine effectiveness was quite low. The CDC also redefined what a vaccine was from fully preventing against the target illness to merely reducing symptoms (and they encouraged mixing and matching the boosters between manufacturers!), to
As the hysteria died down small reports, mostly unreported by the media, of scientific backsliding: that COVID vaccination decreased immune function compared to the unvaccinated, that there have been drastically increased heart attack rates, while overall mortality rates spiked since the vaccine rollouts per insurance mortality tables and remain elevated (or even increase) indefinitely. A study came out claiming mask use was carcinogenic due to breathing in nanoparticles containing Titanium Dioxide, a group 2B carcinogenic. Then the CDC apologized for its inconsistent messaging and vowed to conduct a sweeping reorganization to rebuild public trust, which seems exceedingly unlikely; once an organization loses public goodwill it is difficult to regain. Meanwhile the FDA petitioned a judge to hide underlying data on Pfizer and Modern’s COVID-19 vaccines for 55 years - oops. On the other hand, instead of coming out and admitting its errors, the establishment increasingly banned the spread of information counter to official narratives, i.e. California decided to revoke the medical licenses of any doctor who questioned its propaganda, mass media continues to censor on behalf of Pfizer/the establishment (inconsistently), and the CDC added the COVID vaccine to its routine immunization schedule for children. It’s prominently displayed on their website:
Thanks, Lord Fauci and the CDC! I, for one, am humbled and grateful that this incredibly poisonous mRNA experimental vaccine with extreme side effects is now being routinely given to children as young as 6 months.
During this process all major dissenting voices to the COVID narrative on social media were silenced, suspended or banned. Examples include Alex Berenson, Robert Malone, Mike Yeadon, Sucharit Bhakdi, and Joe Rogan (who pathetically groveled to his establishment masters in an insincere apology).
One should keep in mind this meta-narrative was conducted for a virus with flat overall mortality in 2020, with conflicting information about whether the COVID-19 virus itself has even been isolated — PCR and rapid tests only tested for the broad COVID class, not COVID-192; and PCR positivity rates depend on the number of times the sample was amplified, i.e. if amplified 25x+ the false positivity rate is enormous. Official amplification rates on tests has never been revealed, but it was estimated by various parties to have been amplified 40x under Trump; after Biden won in 2020, the CDC announced they would lower amplification rates.
While the media pushed “Trust the Science!” slogans throughout the “pandemic”, which pro-government supporters eagerly adopted and pushed on their unfortunate friends and family as a virtue signal, what these people really trusted was Scientism: science as politicized approval by committee, i.e. trust the “scientific consensus” which relied on incomplete and inaccurate data modeling combined with massive pressure to conform to group decisions. This is an awful, intentional bastardization of the traditional understanding of science as a series of rigorous, repeatable experiments under rigid criteria. If you can’t repeat an experiment it isn’t science — it’s scientism.3 They used this same process for global warming - remember Al Gore in 2006 blockbuster “An Inconvenient Truth” where he breathlessly promised all the ocean ice would melt by 2014, by relying on “scientific consensus” and “scientific modeling”? (Globohomo apparently wasn’t trying very hard with his follow-up, a Downs-syndrome low IQ child).
Faith in public health experts is down markedly since the start of COVID due to its haphazard, sloppy, and highly political response, but sacrificing expert and institutional credibility in order to advance a political agenda was acceptable to the establishment. (Another example of skin-suited science institutions was NASA making “Muslim outreach" their top 2010 goal).
To compound the issue further most studies are fake, which is called the “replication crisis.” Due to lopsided funding incentives — most scientists rely on university and government funds for their studies and want to advance in their careers and achieve future funding, so they tell their sponsors the data they want to hear — most studies can’t be replicated. There’s also a revolving door between government and scientific institutions so the motivation to advance political agendas instead of following actual science is enormous.
INSTITUTIONAL CREDIBILITY COLLAPSE FORCES ONE TO RELY ON SELF- RESEARCH
Establishment approved experts not only offer terrible advice but they seem to actively go out of their way to promote the wrong advice. They do this because it creates a dependency feedback loop that creates more work for the experts and hence more profits. To most people leaving important decisions up to experts is comforting; it relieves a person of personal responsibility. To take on that personal responsibility without having an initial understanding of a topic, having to do your own research with trial and error using your own logic and intuition, while still balancing all the other areas of your life is a daunting task. But it cannot be otherwise and arguably should never have been otherwise. You are ultimately responsible for your health and welfare, not impersonal “experts” who see you as a dollar sign and a number.
The blogger and born again Christian Roosh has discussed his exhaustion from his lack of trust in experts and having to conduct his own research in every area of life:
“We live in an age where the authorities label truth as falsehood, and falsehood truth. I can’t take anyone’s word for anything, and have to do my own research on the most trivial of matters, such as if a tablespoon of safflower oil in my cashew butter is going to start a cascade reaction in my body that leads to an untimely stroke. The authorities have abused me for so long that I can no longer trust them. I have to become an expert on everything, and I hate it.
In the past, you became an expert within a specific domain. For men, that meant farming, war, or governance. You spent most of your waking hours perfecting your skill in those fields, and trusted other experts for matters which you did not know. Today, the experts are liars. They will say anything the oligarchs want to keep their jobs and maintain a pleasurable lifestyle. We don’t have experts anymore, only shills, marketers, and traitors to mankind. The “experts” have declared this additive to be safe in food, but they lie for profit, and I must search online for the real story. This takes time and does not guarantee the information I’ll receive is accurate, but if I care the least bit about my health, I have no choice. After doing this for several years, I realize that I don’t have just one job (writer) but several…
Nutritionist — I’m an expert on the poisonous nature of the American food supply. I know that vegetable oils are industrial waste. I know that they put a non-food seaweed addictive (carrageenan) in ice cream and lunch meats. I know that the increase in heart attacks and cancers is specifically due to foods that industry-controlled doctors claim are “healthy.” I know all of this because I spent dozens of hours researching it. I never intended to become a nutritionist, but I’m halfway to getting a degree in the field.
Baker — All I wanted was bread without high-fructose corn syrup, but I could not find it in the supermarket, so I became a baker. I started with a bread machine and have graduated to hand-kneading and using loaf pans. Then I wanted pizza without soybean oil. So I learned how to make pizza. I wanted banana bread and cookies and cakes without the typical sludge they put into them, so I learned how to bake them. I’m not far away from grinding my own flour. I never intended to be a baker, but today I’m almost qualified to open a bakeshop.
Doctor — I was on a pre-med track in undergraduate school before deciding that I did not want to be a doctor, but because Western medicine has become corrupt and murderous, I had to become a doctor after all! I often review scientific studies and data. I’m always researching natural cures, skeptical even of over-the-counter drugs like ibuprofen and loratadine. I look for patterns of side effects in anecdotal reports of “vaccine” treatments. All of these I do because if I let a real doctor, who is trained by the pharmaceutical industry, do to me as he wills, he will dump a load of toxins in my body or make me a pill popper for life. I never intended to become a doctor, and deliberately decided against the field, but if you come to me with an illness, I believe I’d do less harm to you than a real doctor with my apple cider vinegar and baking soda treatment plan….
(He continues to list various things he has had to become an expert in due to lack of faith in authority figures)
In casual conversation, I’m expected to share my opinion on everything under the sun, but even what I do know is but a drop in the ocean of knowledge. Why must I know everything? Why must I have an opinion on all things?”
Maurice Samuel, in his book “You Gentiles”, makes a similar point when he discusses relying on his own experiences and thoughts instead of on books and experts4:
“There is no test or guarantee of a man's wisdom or his reliability beyond what he says about life itself. Life is the touchstone: books must be read and understood in order that we may compare our experience in life with the sincere report of the experience of others. But such a one, who has read all the books extant on history and art, is of no consequence unless they are an indirect commentary on what he feels around him.
Hence, if I have drawn chiefly on experience and contemplation and little on books - which others will discover without my admission - this does not affect my competency, which must be judged by standards infinitely more difficult of application. Life is not so simple that you can test a man's nearness to truth by giving him a college examination. Such examinations are mere games - they have no relation to reality. You may desire some such easy standard by which you can judge whether or not a man is reliable: Does he know much history? Much biology? Much psychology? If not, he is not worth listening to. But it is part of the frivolity of our outlook to reduce life to a set of rules, and thus save ourselves the agony of constant references to first principles. No: standardized knowledge is no guarantee of truth. Put down a simple question - a living question, like this: "Should A. have killed B.?" Ask it of ten fools: five will say "Yes", five will say "No." Ask it of ten intelligent men: five will say "Yes," five will say "No." Ask it of ten scholars: five will say "Yes," five will say "No." The fools will have no reasons for their decisions: the intelligent men will have a few reasons for and as many against; the scholars will have more reasons for and against. But where does the truth lie?
What, then, should be the criterion of a man's reliability?
There is none. You cannot evade your responsibility thus by entrusting your salvation into the hands of a priest-specialist. A simpleton may bring you salvation and a great philosopher may confound you.
And so to life, as I have seen it working in others and felt it within myself, I refer the truth of what I say. And to books I refer only in so far as they are manifestations of life.”
Give up decisions in life to experts at your own peril. But it isn’t easy; it takes discernment and mistakes, trial and error, leaving room for uncertainty in ones outlook and a willingness to always be willing to reassess a situation if new facts are presented, that is refined over a lifetime. When presented with information, asking Cicero’s famed “cui bono?” (“Who benefits?”) is usually a good place to start. This isn’t to say one can’t build up some element of trust with specific experts, but such trust should be built up over a lengthy period of time after verifying the person’s expertise, motivations, and accuracy as best as possible (and always try to retain some degree of skepticism in case that person fails you).
THE PUBLIC'S BLIND TRUST IN EXPERTS DERIVES FROM MODERN EDUCATION
Most have given up their critical thinking skills because they were taught to trust experts and authority figures in formal education, drilled in from a young age.
There are two primary ways to educate children: the first and most common way is to have them memorize an endless series of facts; facts about science, facts about history, facts about geography, facts about math. The student regurgitates this information, is graded on it, and advances to continue their studies so long as they show aptitude for this repetition. Self-study is discouraged; individual ideas are not explored; interpretations not approved by the teachers or handbooks are given low marks and the student is not allowed to advance. The type of person to graduate from such a system is a 22 (or after graduate school or PhD, 25 or 28) year old man-child, a person who knows only theory, nothing about it is applied in the real world, nothing about trial and error or dealing with practical consequences for one’s decisions, compared to prior generations where work would start either in childhood or shortly thereafter. The reward for willing regurgitation of platitudes has traditionally been employment with the expectation that the graduate will adopt himself to the mantras of the employing institution without any critical thinking or reasoning. A cradle to the grave system of control and indoctrination.5 This method was promoted successfully by Dewey in America.6
The alternative way to educate a child is to encourage their own personal development; to inquire, to make mistakes, to learn and experience and grow using their own intuition and beliefs as a guide which ultimately contributes both to the character, strength and intelligence of the child. Entry into the workforce involving limited formal education and then long-term apprenticeship to learn skills.7 This method is mostly frowned upon in the modern west.
Schopenhauer has much to say on this exact point in his essay On Education:
“The human intellect is said to be so constituted that general ideas arise by abstraction from particular observations, and therefore come after them in point of time. If this is what actually occurs, as happens in the case of a man who has to depend solely upon his own experience for what he learns — who has no teacher and no book — such a man knows quite well which of his particular observations belong to and are represented by each of his general ideas. He has a perfect acquaintance with both sides of his experience, and accordingly, he treats everything that comes in his way from a right standpoint. This might be called the natural method of education.
Contrarily, the artificial method is to hear what other people say, to learn and to read, and so to get your head crammed full of general ideas before you have any sort of extended acquaintance with the world as it is, and as you may see it for yourself. You will be told that the particular observations which go to make these general ideas will come to you later on in the course of experience; but until that time arrives, you apply your general ideas wrongly, you judge men and things from a wrong standpoint, you see them in a wrong light, and treat them in a wrong way. So it is that education perverts the mind.
This explains why it so frequently happens that, after a long course of learning and reading, we enter upon the world in our youth, partly with an artless ignorance of things, partly with wrong notions about them; so that our demeanor savors at one moment of a nervous anxiety, at another of a mistaken confidence. The reason of this is simply that our head is full of general ideas which we are now trying to turn to some use, but which we hardly ever apply rightly. This is the result of acting in direct opposition to the natural development of the mind by obtaining general ideas first, and particular observations last: it is putting the cart before the horse. Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected. This is why so few men of learning are possessed of common-sense, such as is often to be met with in people who have had no instruction at all.”
How can we expect the masses of indoctrinated people, educated in a method of repetition which ignores reason and experience, to defend their own interests when they cannot figure out what their own interests even are?8 Worse, the level of formal indoctrination is getting cruder: do we expect California public school children, raised on anti-white race-grievance books (see their Department of Education recommended reading list, with classic books banned and IQ tests for black students banned) to even be able to function as a drone in a 21st century tech economy?
PEOPLE ACTING OUT META-NARRATIVES INSPIRED THE “NPC” MEME
The use of formal education to stamp out the same product in an industrialized manner has contributed to the NPC plague.
Many have noticed the countless individuals who adopt the current meta-narrative and virtue signal to friends, family and on social media with dramatic urgency, all chanting the same mantras. This led to the rise of the still-relevant non-playable character “NPC” meme in 2016:
A non-playable character in a video game is a digital character controlled by the computer (instead of a player) that has a predetermined set of behaviors that potentially impact gameplay, but will not be the product of true artificial intelligence. Our standard-output education system feeds into the NPC phenomenon, but so does entertainment, media, and technology generally.
Twitter user Zero HP Lovecraft eviscerates the mentality of NPCs in a series of tweets. He blames their mindset primarily on the advance of technology, which creates widespread uniformity of thought, and ties it into Kaczynski’s theory of liberal oversocialization:
"The NPC meme isn’t about free will and it isn’t about inner monologues and it isn’t about seeing yourself as the hero of your own personal Campbellian journey. It’s about the homogenization of inner life in the era of mass media.
There’s a sort of implicit claim that is fundamental to humanistic thought, which is fundamental to this era of western thought, it’s the idea that Gaussian variance aside, everyone has petty much the same experiential topology. Let’s call it human neurological uniformity (HNU). Ignoring such people as autists for the moment, and given HNU, which most people believe perhaps without ever having thought about it, what do we expect to happen when everyone watches the same small pool of TV shows and news broadcasts?
Suppose you have agency, inner life, etc. And you decide, using the marvelous brightness in your soul, to watch 60 hours of Game of Thrones. Because you are normal, you now have thoughts about John Snow and Daenerys, thoughts which you share with millions of others.
And there is nothing wrong with enjoying TV shows, but when millions of people watch the same TV show, and the same news commentators, and read the same articles, they think all the same thoughts, literally the same thoughts, with the same words, the same words we all heard.
We all have looping behaviors because life is on average repetitive. People are predictable despite individual variation in the same way that thermodynamic systems are predictable without modeling every individual particle.
Industrialization is a process of mass repetition and homogenization. Industrial man is highly repetitive and homogenized, and the mechanism that repeats and homogenizes is broadcast media. Before that it was books, pamphlets and newspapers. The nature of our inner life in broadcast media vs. written media is different. The idea of the NPC refers to a kind of total conformity of being that is brought about by broadcast media.
Tocqueville described the NPC meme in 1895. "What is still more strange is that all these men, who kept themselves so apart from each other, had become so much alike that it would have been impossible to distinguish them if their places had been changed." He was talking about the effects of reading books mass-produced by the printing press. Cobbett in 1795: Every farmer is more or less of a reader. There is [...] no class like that which the French call peasantry...They have all been readers from their youth up. Ironically avid readers are probably less NPC-ish than "illiterate" TV-primary people. In a highly literate society, visual and behavioral conformity frees the individual for inner deviation. Not so in an oral society where inner verbalization is social action.
You can log in to Netflix and see a hundred different shows, but they're all very similar in their underlying themes and worldviews. Even the older stuff is carefully curated to mesh with contemporary sensibilities, mostly. The same characters in different shows, the same dramas. The effect of watching so much TV is you form a series of unilateral friendships. It feels like you personally know all the people you are watching, and you move into social alignment with them, just like with a group of in-person friends.
This fits the Kaczynskian take that leftists are “oversocialized". A person could be so thoroughly conditioned with society's values as to compromise their own agency to make choices as independent individuals. We find ourselves in a pervasive system of cradle to grave social conditioning, starting with childhood to early adulthood and then continually reinforced through authority figures in media, entertainment, and politics. The cumulative effect of all this can result in tragic individuals who can think and feel just as any of us can, yet are compelled to to comply with their social conditioning in order to avoid unbearable psychological suffering. This is very different to a community or subculture with its own distinct aphorisms and in-jokes. The oversocialized never chose to be the way they are, it was imposed upon them.
TV, movies, and pundits (newscasts, podcasts, bluechecks) are the medium of oversocialization. If you dig back into early memories of childhood cartoons and sitcoms you can almost remember the way it happened. It's not indoctrination exactly, since that implies a baseline.
We are all oversocialized and the act of waking up is the act of bearing and confronting the pain of pushing back against our social programming. You only do this if you have a powerful incentive to do so, i.e., you are already in a circumstance of tremendous psychological pain. The common pathway to right-wing shitlordery is through the PUA/Redpill/manosphere pipeline. Gamers are rendered sterile by their oversocialization and the soul-crushing pain of TFW no GF (i.e. “that feeling when no girlfriend”, a meme) causes them to confront their social programming in all arenas of the mind.
In the evolving meaning of the NPC meme, we are realizing that it is most effective as a way to instantaneously convey that a person is in the grip of Kaczynskian oversocialization. Even naming the evil spirit is enough to cause tremendous psychic distress, as we have seen.
If social programming privileges one group over another, it is safe to say that the disprivileged group will tend to be the one that is in the most pain, and therefore the most likely to break free of their programming. This should raise some uncomfortable questions for everyone.”
One can imagine how much worse this phenomena has become after the mass-adoption of the iPhone, with constant establishment-approved pop-up propaganda appearing on people’s phones, along with the centralization of the internet into a couple of nodes (sites owned and operated by Facebook and Google such as WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram account for over 70% of all internet traffic). Additionally, social media algorithms promote establishment-approved topics and “influencers” and de-emphasize or censor disfavored topics/individuals, fueling this homogenizing process further. As Huxley wrote in Brave New World, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
In other words, stop reading, watching and following what everyone else is reading, watching and following, or your thoughts and feelings will synchronize with everyone else where you become just another homogenized, gray herd creature, lacking true individuality or uniqueness.
Your mind is their target.
*******
This concludes The Dissemination of Information in Technological Society.
In the next section, “Dissonance to Informational Control in Technological Society”, we will explore the rise of cognitive dissonance to establishment propaganda and what types of people are more likely to experience it and why.
A study reviewed research of almost 70,000 people and found that elevated levels of “bad cholesterol” did not raise the risk of early death from cardiovascular disease in people over 60. The authors called for statin guidelines to be reviewed, claiming the benefits of statins are “exaggerated.”
Per the CDC: “CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.”
“Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it. If they say to you science has shown such and such, you might ask, “How does science show it–how did the scientists find out–how, what, where?” Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at.” - Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
You Gentiles, p. 16-19.
According to Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, the ideological brainwashing repetitively given in formal education results in many people suffering from a form of ideological demoralization: “'They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior’…Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible.” Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed.”
Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, 132.
A man's purpose is a combination of what he is good at and interested in, no matter how popular or obscure the topic, discovering its essence and then sharing it with others. It is up to us whether we choose to engage with our purpose, which provides soul satisfaction -- regardless of whether or not one "succeeds" -- or to ignore our purpose and feel a continual, nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Few people in this world are blessed with the actualization of their purpose, and most people have not been provided the education or role models to even provide them with this conceptualization. As Tolkien said in The Return of the King, p. 190, "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
Aristotle, echoed by St Ignatius Loyala, famously said, “Give me a child till he’s seven, and I will show you the man.”
Additionally, while the repetition of formal education has a massive indoctrination effect, people are much more susceptible to propaganda when they don't recognize that what they are experiencing is propaganda, which occurs most easily and subliminally through entertainment.
Quite possibly the most under rated substack in existence.
Superb writing. The last part on the NPC-ness of the majority really brought home the fact that one needs to constantly remind oneself when listening to such people (often longstanding friends and acquaintances) regurgitate propaganda and programmed attitudes, that it is not their fault. It is a lifetime of such programming. Which is one heck of a spell to break. And there but for the grace of God etc.