FACTS ARE BELIEFS

In email debate with a friend over the interpretation of a very important and presumably real event, as recorded in pictures and videos uploaded to the internet, we have reached an impasse of interpretation.  We have had to 'agree to disagree'. We are not, as far as I know, disagreeing about the veracity of  the evidential pictures and videos in themselves (were they doctored? are they fake?), but rather over what they reveal, or conceal, accepted as they are. On the interpretation of this event, as I say, a very great deal of a political nature hangs, but each of us would I think insist this has no influence whatever on our interpretation of the event itself as depicted!  Our interpretation, we would each say, is dispassionate. We're each describing 'the facts'.  We're rational creatures. Political loyalties are irrelevant!   

So how come we don't reach the same conclusion?  And, further, how come no amount of debate, it appears, will change our respective positions?

Our stubbornness reflects our certainty; but more than that: our commitment.  We have each reached a floor of belief below which we can't, or won't dig. The buck has stopped. To go deeper (this is vital, friends!) would, we each seem to argue, be unnecessary, because we each already know everything necessary to the issue at hand. We have, as we say, made up our minds.

This isn't a trivial debate.  We're not arguing semantics, like Do snakes bite or sting? So do you sense the utter unsatisfactoriness of this situation? Facts are facts, right? The inarguable bedrock of belief. Right?

The hell they are. Facts are beliefs! To bolster an empty claim to unassailable authority we have put the cart before the horse, and switched their roles. Each of our positions is, at best, an act of faith. You don't know what you don't know. You cannot - ever - know all there is to know. On the other hand (there you go!) to act at all requires a commitment to a particular interpretation of the way things are, and a concomitant exclusion of whatever conflicts with it. That decision made, the action that required the prior commitment now takes place, and the results of that action confirm or refute the prior commitment as appropriate, or mistaken. Even putting one foot in front of the other requires an act of faith which however is so often vindicated that we can safely consign it to the automatic - until (like my sister, or David A. here) we trip and break something!  There follows a reevaluation of belief ('Gosh! Getting older; need to take more care!') as a result of augmented experience.

But much that we're committed to may be believed without the need for proof, because our belief in it (unlike walking) is self-validating. Our professed belief itself demonstrates our membership of and commitment to a particular collective. One can say that in this case the belief is the proof. It is self-evidentiary. Religion, and war propaganda fall squarely into this category, and to varying degrees so does any membership in general.  Our community participation is confirmed by affirmation of a shared belief without which that community would not exist, and for whose definition a credo may therefore be necessary, and explicitly recited, to establish and maintain its identity, its reality - a pledge of allegiance. To hold a contrary opinion about any element of a collective belief is thus a form of disloyalty, even heresy, which if neither renounced nor able to bring about a change to the credo, must result in excommunication of the offending 'heretic', who accordingly becomes an outcast. That is the way human affairs are conducted, and I think in no other. Facts, let me reiterate, are shared beliefs.

We find ourselves today divided to a degree unprecedented in my lifetime. The division manifests as increasing, mutual incomprehension, as adherence to previously shared credos falls away, and what were 'facts' are questioned. If members of an organisation lose faith in its beliefs then 'How can they not see these facts?' the remaining members will ask. 'What idiots!  How stupid!'  And either repentance and recantation, or excommunication of the miscreants must inevitably follow. 

So what has happened? The supposed 'facts' were actually a declaration of faith in a shared, community system. The two are indivisible; they define each other. They are in an important sense one and the same. The breakaway community now shares a different interpretation of the 'facts', and accordingly has its own adherents, and detractors, and deviants, and heretics, just like the original! 

Here are some random examples of belief-based 'facts': same-sex marriage is currently inadmissible in the Roman Catholic Church, within which system it does not exist.  You cannot as a Catholic at one and the same time claim to be married, and this to someone of the same sex. The thing is impossible, because it violates the faith you claim to believe in. If the whole world were Roman Catholic the apparently hard factuality of this belief would be inarguable. Queen Elizabeth the First did not have lovers. How could she?  She was the Virgin Queen.  Again, any claim to the British throne, that is incompatible with the officially approved genealogy cannot, by definition, be factual. It is verboten.  You cannot object to an ex-male beauty queen on the grounds that she is a he, because the law says she is no longer a he, so the objection has no factual basis.  And you may not even be able to object to a previously-defined male weight lifter competing against conventionally defined women, if no such sexual differentiation is acknowledged by law to exist. That our 'common sense' may rebel against this contortion arises from our adherence to more fundamentally held beliefs about the supposed biological differences between men and women. To continue, you cannot plausibly claim that the Sphynx is at least 9000 years old, because that would violate the archeological orthodoxy in which we are currently invested, as would belief in the existence of UFOs/UAPs, although such things are gradually creeping into factuality - materialising! - at a rate our authorities gauge the public can handle. You cannot as an American accept that JFK was assassinated by several shooters, because your own government says L H Oswald did it all on his own, even as it keeps extending the release date of the documentation that 'proves' it (or doesn't). You cannot accept that Mike Lindell, the 'pillow man', has proof the November 2020 election was stolen, because he's a white, Republican, Trump-loving bigot who can't live with the 'truth'.  Nor can you claim Covid 19 shots are dangerous, because no less than the CDC, the WHO, the FDA and Rachel Maddow have declared them 'safe and effective', and to publicly claim otherwise is a punishable heresy. 

In each and every case cited above the 'facts' are declarations of loyalty to a credo; sort of mini religions. Membership of this or that community of believers dictates the facts.  And so to a final, concrete (and steel) example -

This, we're authoritatively informed, is a controlled demolition (CD), using meticulously placed charges, to bring down a tall, steel frame building whose uncontrolled collapse would be uneven, causing it to smash into neighboring structures.

And here's the actual case that prompted this post (you can click on the bottom right of the video to enlarge it): a tall, steel frame building, also brought down symmetrically, but we're as authoritatively informed, not by controlled demolition, but by the kind of damage - random fires - that supposedly make CD necessary. 

  

I anticipate a certain amount of resistance to some, maybe all, of the above examples, plucked, except for the last, rather carelessly as they were from my current thoughtscape, and not yours. They're intended to highlight how our allegiances determine what we deem to be facts. We see what we believe. What is actually 'out there' who on Earth knows? But insisting that facts are beliefs does not mean I might take a fancy to leap from my office window, believing I could fly (as Rene has triumphantly invited me to do more than once)!  No, of course not, but not because facts are hard and independent, unlike Peter Pan fantasies, but, more subtly, because chains of similar experiences that we continuously link together to make sense of the world (like my sister's, and David A's fall) forcefully suggest it wouldn't be a good idea, which is not quite the same thing. Knowing the effects of gravity from daily experience I won't launch myself wingless from my office window, hoping to soar skywards! But as wretched Eric Clapton will testify, a very small child may make exactly that mistake, for lack of prior experience, not for lack of a degree in physics, or from a failure to  respect 'objective  reality'. 

Even a goat knows its limitations where heights are concerned, and Newton's theories be damned! Physical laws manifest in the act of being experienced. It's only later that we start to develop theories to explain them - and maybe in the process even dethrone Newton. 

Who wouldn't experience cognitive dissonance if, like Winston in George Orwell's 1984, their Maximum Leader held up four fingers and insisted they were five? Structural engineers suffered a similar conflict of loyalties when shown what looked exactly like a controlled demolition on 9/11/2001 only to be told, after three years in which NIST struggled to come up with a plausible computer simulation that squared with the observable collapse without revealing a conspiracy, that it was caused by random fires. They may have 'gone along to get along', but their professional knowledge rebelled against such intellectual violence, and a community championing countervailing facts was born - Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911). Mainstream mouthpiece Wikipedia, true to form, calls them a group of 'conspiracy theorists', and thus the battle lines over 'facts' are drawn up. We see the same phenomenon again with the Covid-19 debacle; doctors everywhere suffering cognitive dissonance as they tried to square their medical training with the unprecedented and destructive medical mandates enforced by political authorities. And so, again, 'dissident' medical groups sprang up to counter the accusations of misinformation with platforms of their own, such as Children's Health Defense, America's Frontline Doctors, and La Quinta Columna. Not that their facts are more objective, but that they are loyal to, they claim, more long-lasting beliefs about disease and health than those advanced by politicians with power and an agenda to ram through without consultation with - or even ignoring - impartial, expert advice.

Fundamental beliefs and values will in general be ignored by a public brow-beaten by authority into violating them, as both the Milgram and the Asche experiments troublingly revealed. The Nuremberg trials notwithstanding, 'I was just following orders' is the universal get-out-of-jail-free card that excuses any and every action and inaction committed in obedience to authority. 'No man is an island'. Forced to choose, we respond more to herd pressure - authority - than to rational appeals, because the former represents the fund of experience upon which society has been built. Ours is generally not to reason why, because to question authority is an act of disloyalty to that upon which our security depends. Whistleblowers, like martyrs, are rare, because they risk excommunication and worse by challenging the authority structure with an assault on the accepted facts which dictate thought itself.        

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Pablo

 

CONFRONTING THE UNTHINKABLE

The fringes are, by definition, the habitat of the abnormal. This is where us crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and the generally mentally deranged hang out 😂  But is this to say that the mental operations of the mainstream are rational?  Where our social interactions are concerned, I would argue that they are not. On the contrary, when 'normality' is threatened a deeper, more ancient and primitive mental region is retreated to. This part of the brain is impervious to rational appeals. It is concerned simply with the defense of the collective, upon which the survival of the community depends, and for which task any critical thinking must be directed outwards, at the attacker, and not at our own beliefs.  This is a knee-jerk reaction, not a rational one.

 

Accordingly, your response to the attached interview will at least initially be dictated by which side of the Covid divide you're on. The pro-C-19-vaxxer will as instantly recognize the enemy as would a Ukrainian hearing a Russian accent; while the anti-  will hang on every word, energized by the same truths that have pro-vaxxers reaching for the DELETE button.  That's how we are, and it's only our unfounded assumptions about the preeminence of the thinking faculty that blind us to the deeper and more powerful drives of which thinking is as much the handmaiden as the boss. 

Thinking is, first and foremost, harnessed to the task of defending the community of agreements with which our beliefs identify. Criticisms directed at that are a potential threat to us. Persons thus threatened are not intellectually separate from the community with which they identify. On the contrary, the two are very much welded together. 

 

This is why – forgive the leap - our communities tend to be ruled by sociopaths. Sociopaths are 'wild', whereas those they govern are 'tame'.  Because they are unconstrained by 'normal' humanitarian impulses, sociopaths can move freely outside the moral boundaries community members are instinctively committed to, and are thus able to focus on and implement such emotionally neutral concerns as the efficient attainment of goals that their subjects would reject as morally unthinkable.

 

After sixteen years as worldwide research head and Vice President for Pfizer’s respiratory unit, and thereafter CEO of a successful biotech company, Dr. Mike Yeadon found himself led by logical deduction in 2020 and beyond to the reluctant conclusion that the populations of the Western world are being deliberately culled. 

His naturally humanitarian self at first refused to entertain such a ghastly possibility, but the excuse of sheer governmental stupidity became increasingly untenable as he witnessed decision after decision being taken that ran counter to the accumulated medical wisdom with which he was familiar, and which until then had defined the medical community.  Feeling morally compelled thereafter to alert the wider public to what was being done to them, Yeadon immediately ran foul of both the power of those pushing the agenda, and the community resistance of a public whose instincts were the same as his had been, but who lacked either the medical expertise or, alternatively, the disenchantment to confront the unthinkable and accept his conclusions.

 

Now time has all but run out, but the tide is gradually turning as more and more people lose their freedoms, their livelihoods, and their health. Although demonetized and de-platformed Dr. Yeadon continues courageously to speak out about the genocidal – some are now calling them democidal - crimes being perpetrated on the public by their governments through, especially, their so-called health services. Here he is interviewed by Maajid Nawaz -   

 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/political-theatre/former-lead-pfizer-scientist-mike-yeadon-all-is-planned-and-theyre-coming-for-you/

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Pablo

TRUTH AND LIES

First, to briefly recap: 

Facts are collective beliefs, or agreements, about the way individual things are thought, by experience, to actually be. To say they are of the nature of conventions is not to belittle them: they're all we have! But they can be, and continually are, legitimately changed when they conflict with more foundational, or better connected facts. They can also be, and too often are, illegitimately changed when they conflict with the will to power.

Trust is where the buck of verification of facts ultimately stops. The entire community edifice of agreed facts is built on trust. Trust is tautological, or, better, self-referential: we trust what we take to be true. The truth is simply that which we trust.

Lies are malicious breaches of trust. 

Evil is the practice of lies as a means to illegitimately satisfy the will to power.

 

What was all that about?  Well, there are some really good articles on LifeSite News right now! Today's editorial contains important links; do please click on any that seem of further interest.

 

And so, to cut finally to the chase, whenever people refer to Hegel's Problem, Reaction, Solution to suggest the Machiavellian manipulation of events, where others may jeer ‘Conspiracy theory!’ I've tended to mentally go 'Yeah, yeah, heard that; understand that,' without actually, it now appears, internalising the real evil (see recap, above) involved in the execution of this fiendish formula. 

 

And now I find we're buried in it! 

 

It seems to me it can be convincingly argued that everything that justifies the direction in which we are all being driven is deliberate, manufactured fiction – lies - woven often from whole cloth, whose believability by we dupes has been made possible by the methodical capture of all the trusted  institutions and individuals responsible for overseeing the management of facts. I like to think that we all know at some level that this is true, but there's a powerful, governing principle apparently still inside me, and maybe inside you, that insists on behaving as if at the very least the main messages of control governing our political life are founded on honestly verified fact.

 

They aren’t.

 

I am therefore shaken up, and energised, by these LifeSite articles, which are dismissing mere institutional reform and rehabilitation as inadequate to the task now facing humanity, or at least America.  They are calling instead for nothing less than the abolition of dozens, if not hundreds of government institutions! That is a very radical position. Why such extremism?

 

The reason they are doing this is because they themselves are facing extermination. 

 

And so are we.  Not to be melodramatic, but it’s us or them.

 

Transhumanism – yes, that’s where we’re headed - is beyond a mere proposal now. It is actively being pursued, and it is an assault on the very core of our humanity. As such, it can only be deemed evil,    because it is built entirely on a different set of life premises than those by which we at least claim to be factually governed, and which are moral. The springboard for the transhumanist project is amoral. Not to see the intrinsic evil of this is either to misunderstand it, to underestimate it, or to side with it and therefore against humanity.

 

Indeed, the enormity of what's unfolding is too overwhelmingly revolutionary to grasp in its entirety. In broadest outline, transhumanism seems to me to require being on the outside, looking in on human life and affairs as one would a diorama, a chessboard, or a fishbowl. This is the mindset of despots. It is also the methodology of scientism. And it is engaged in by human beings, who like everyone else are wholly immersed in the universal continuum, but have artificially separated themselves from it by a total investment in thought. To suffer such alienation as our inevitable human condition is one thing, but to embrace it as a religion is something else entirely, and that is exactly what is happening. 

 

It's really quite - biblical!

 

So this is what we're up against. And we really are. And it seems to me to require two responses.  The first is to recognise that we are an intrinsic component, an expression, of the Universe. There is nothing whatever outside that experience. Everything that exists does so and can only do so through our experience of it, as an experience.  Life is experience - and experience is value. Consequently, everything is value. It’s self-referential. A rose is a rose is a rose. Self incarnate is what we are; our very nature is Self, and nothing else. Ours is a moral universe, through and through. 

 

We are not inhabiting a machine. Nor are we machines. We are living expressions. Scientism has the entire train of existence backwards. 

 

That understood and accepted as our existential reality, our second response, it seems to me, has to be to recognize the evil that is transhumanism, and denounce it. Buddhism calls evil Error, and so it may be, but whatever we choose to call it – evil, badness, or error – it is antithetical to the healthy evolution of the living organism that is our planet, and of which we are a part. And right now it is taking charge.

 

A titanic struggle is under way between lies and truth. The degree to which human affairs have been coopted by lies can be judged by the fanaticism with which all alternatives to government narratives concerning alleged threats to humanity, and their solution, are being crushed. These alternatives are being presented by people heretofore considered experts, i.e. repositories of agreed facts. Their views are being smothered by politicians with power, and corporations with money, both driven by agendas for which these truths (not to be ironical) are inconvenient, their actions justified by the amorality of an overarching scientism that lets them put profit (either money, or power, or both) first.  Distrust in government is consequently escalating rapidly, and rightly. 

 

We are on the cusp of a new world order, but whose will it be?  The paradigm – the religion – of scientism, handmaid of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, will not usher in transhumanism unchallenged. If thwarted in its bid to assume total control after the planned chaos that’s coming, competing world views will rush in to fill the vacuum. In clearing the rubble and righting wrongs let us not succumb to the temptation of mere ‘reform’ of the institutions – LifeSite has named some of them - that led us to this debacle. And lead us they did! Let us rather keep in mind the moral heedlessness that permitted human affairs to reach this perilous stage, and proceed with humility to rebuild integrity – the baby that scientism, unable to tell the difference, threw out with the bathwater - with new institutions, from the ground up.

To learn more about transhumanism, go here.

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Pablo

HOW TO RUN A MAD WORLD

In this podcast, Russell Brand shares the spectacle of UK PM Liz Truss assuring the British public (to spontaneous applause!) that she'll opt for Mutually Assured Destruction if push comes to shove, to defeat those who oppose our democratic way of life. In the same podcast Brand also shares that the Biden Administration now 'refuses to publish military expenditure', i.e. the American public are not to know how much of their money he's spending on ‘defence’. 

What?

Meanwhile, Dr. John Campbell is wondering what might be causing double the rates of 'long Covid' in the U.S. than in the UK - what U.S. authorities are calling a 'mass disabling event'. Listing several possibilities, he ends cryptically with 'Is it related to factors we're really not at liberty to discuss?'  

Slipping that slyly in without further elaboration, he adroitly forestalls the question this lacuna begs - namely, might it have something to do with the higher American rates of mRNA injections? - by volunteering that 'We don't have data that compares vaccinated with unvaccinated people for the level of long Covid. We don't have that data. We simply don't have it. We simply - don't - know.'  

 

Once again, What?? 

 

Because this is another can of worms that Dr. John Campbell, and indeed the entire, politically correct MSM cannot open. It is sealed in a conspiracy of silence.

 

But Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, outside the sealed, secular order, has a can opener. Just the other day he opined in an interview here that 

'[T]he vaccination of an experimental gene serum must be imposed on everyone so that people will not see that the adverse effects and deaths affect only the vaccinated...' 

 

We're not conspiracy theorists, are we, but if this naked slander were true, then indeed it would become necessary to hide the data if it would reveal such a difference. Right? Fortunately this cannot be the case, or we'd all be f*ck*d, and Vigano, were he a news anchor, would be rightly silenced for letting the side down for even suggesting it. 

 

Which leaves us, however, with this conundrum - Why do we consider it thinkable that our leaders might order our annihilation by means of a potentially imminent nuclear exchange, but not that they might be already more selectively culling us by potentially lethal injection? 

Let me propose a simple, if unflattering answer: the former requires us to do nothing except present a united front, demonstrating our national solidarity by our applause. It hasn't yet happened, it may never happen, and in its sheer magnitude it's all but unthinkable. PM Truss’s affirmative also displays an uncharacteristic, almost humourous candour on the part of a politician.  Her very assertion of it practically amounts to a denial. Politicians do not speak the truth about such momentous, indeed monstrous, issues.

 

The latter, however, displays none of these qualities, except the unthinkable  magnitude part. If true, it's already happening; we ourselves may actually be its victims, and although we know our politicians lie for a living, that's the forever unspoken part of the social contract whose spell must never be broken if, like hens in a chicken coop, we are to accept our present, more or less comfortable role in the social hierarchy. For the sake of our sense of community the myth of political transparency and a harmony of goals between us and our elites must be maintained.  That is the conspiracy!

 

Pablo