Manufacturing Truth
CJ Hopkins
If you’re one of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still believe there is such a thing as “the truth,” you might not want to read this essay. Seriously, it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no “truth” … or rather, that what we’re all conditioned to regard as “truth” from the time we are children is just the product of a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being. Humans, upon first encountering this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the “Word of God,” or “the immutable laws of quantum physics,” and run around burning other people at the stake or locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don’t want to be responsible for anything like that, so consider this your trigger warning.
OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how “truth” is manufactured. It’s actually not that complicated. See, the “truth” is … well, it’s a story, essentially. It’s whatever story we are telling ourselves at any given point in history (“we” being the majority of people, those conforming to the rules of whatever system wields enough power to dictate the story it wants everyone to be telling themselves). Everyone understands this intuitively, but the majority of people pretend they don’t in order to be able to get by in the system, which punishes anyone who does not conform to its rules, or who contradicts its story. So, basically, to manufacture the truth, all you really need is (a) a story, and (b) enough power to coerce a majority of people in your society to pretend to believe it.
I’ll return to this point a little later. First, let’s look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing “truth.” I’m going to use The Guardian‘s most recent blatantly fabricated article (“Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy”) as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by “respectable” outlets over the course of the last two years.
The “Russian Propaganda Peddlers” story. The “Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton” story. The “Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid” story. The “Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape” story. The “Novichok Assassins” story. The “Bana Alabed Speaks Out” story. The “Trump’s Secret Russian Server” story. The “Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis” story. The “Russians Orchestrated Brexit” story. The “Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms” story. The “Twitter Bots” story. And the list goes on.
I’m not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook, Craig Murray, Glenn Greenwald, Moon of Alabama, and many others). [ed. including us]
The short version is, The Guardian‘s Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed “Russians”) on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding’s earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on … well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous “intelligence sources.” After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece (employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.
By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other “respectable,” “authoritative” outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian‘s story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump … well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and “leftists” who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.
At this point, I imagine you’re probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing “truth.” Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie … a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the “truth” thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes’ lies). Unfortunately, it isn’t. Here is why.
Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one), there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that “truth” is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.
Nor are there many truths (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one truth … the official truth. The truth according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of “truth” was invented (i.e., to render any other “truths” lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some “objective truth” (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger’s dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn’t. The truth is just a story … a story that is never our story.
The truth is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell, unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else’s story. The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. They either parrot the truth of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard their “truth” as heresy. They regard their “truth” as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of the powerless is always heresy.
For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or “fearless adversarial” outlet bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.
Or … all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful when directly confronting The Guardian, or any other corporate media outlet, and state that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can’t afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such heretics.
Look, I’m not trying to argue that it isn’t important to expose the fabrications of the corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do (albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that “the truth” is not going to “rouse the masses from their slumber” and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly “wake up,” “see the truth” and start “the revolution.” People already know the truth … the official truth, which is the only truth there is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story.
As for Julian Assange, I’m afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn’t left them any other option. Much as they are loathe to create another martyr, they can’t have heretics of Assange’s notoriety running around punching holes in their “truth” and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.
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Aside from the fact that positing the relativity of truth as a “fact” also makes it false, implying that it is religious zealots, rather than other sorts that are typically motivated by a ‘discovery’ that all truth is contrived, seems unfair to the point of bigotry. Those who cite the word of God generally dismiss that discovery as nonsense. Those inspired by it to commit atrocities actually tended to be social Darwinists, jabbering about the will to power and the greater good of the species, which happens to be best served by culling most of its members.
I put this up on my Academia site – I have around 50 up on MuralGate and related issues (freely available and waiting to be shared!):
The Land of the Lie
1. Corbyn was never regarded as antisemitic prior to his election as Labour Leader in 2015, not even by his severest critics. This may easily be demonstrated by the fact that, in at least 500 tweets referring to “Jeremy Corbyn,” antisemitism is never mentioned.
2. This does not mean, however, that his critics were sanguine about the possibility of Corbyn gaining power. They weren’t – as we can see from contributions in 2015 of Lord Finkelstein, Anshel Pfeffer, and Marcus Dysch.
3. Writing from a pro-Israel perspective these men were worried about Corbyn’s stance on Palestinian rights, his willingness to talk to Hamas, and the possibility of BDS becoming mainstream, especially should violence flare up again in Gaza.
4. Although the one can easily spill over from one to the other, to oppose Israel is one thing, to be antisemitic another. This was not considered true of Corbyn, and precisely for that reason Corbyn was such a threat. Being free from antisemitism, his criticism of Israel carried all the more weight.
5. So at the time when Corbyn became leader the strategy was not, at first, to accuse him of antisemitism, but rather, that he associated with antisemites and was blind to it.
6. The primary piece of evidence here was his comment on Mear One’s mural which later became notorious. But even though the charge was only that Corbyn was blind, even then the slur failed to gain traction.
7. Yet it came about that Corbyn was eventually attacked for antisemitism. This strategy would prove effective.
8. It must be understood that not only was the accusation known to be weak, but the motive for the attack obvious – to undermine a potentially strong critic of Israel. For that reason those leading the attack had to disguise their agenda.
9. This was facilitated by the fact that Corbyn seemed to have no other Achilles’ heel. Having fought off a leadership challenge, put in a good performance in the general election, and having acquired great popularity “on the street” Corbyn was surprisingly formidable.
10. So, in the accusations of antisemitism the anti-Corbyn critics were offered a life-line to which they clung uncritically. The MSM provided saturation coverage without asking too many questions about the sources that were dredging up the “evidence.”
11. Corbyn’s “antisemitism” became conventional wisdom, so that to criticise the consensus was deemed the preserve of cranks.
12. Here the notion of “conspiracy theory” comes into its own. The idea is ambiguous, and much was traded on the ambiguity.
13. For a “reasonable conspiracy theory” can arise if someone who wants to explain what is going on posits collusion on the part of some group of conspirators. Such a theory deserves to be treated according to the same canons of evidence as any other theory about human affairs.
14. However, “conspiracy theory” in the pejorative sense acquires its connotation from the fact that in order to explain why the consensus rejects a cranky theory gratuitous assumptions must be made regarding a conspiracy among those who could, but will not, verify the theory.
15. For example. Flat Earthers have to pretend that the world-wide community of scientists around the globe (!) have to conspire in order to hide what for them is the true geometry of the planet.
16. Not only is this quite unreasonable, but actually, the idea of a flat earth is not intrinsically linked to a conspiracy at all: it is not the planet that gets together to tell lies, rather, it is human beings that tell lies about the shape of the earth.
17. So, the account of Corbyn’s antisemitism – listed in the bullet points you are now reading – comes to be dismissed conspiracy.
18. Obviously, the Jewish/Israeli connection cannot be avoided since, as indicated, Corbyn was of great interest to those pro-Israel activists behind the accusations.
19. But since, as is well known, nefarious and discredited theories positing conspiracies (of “the elders of Zion”) have arisen in the past, those conspirators who would disguise their motivation can use the trope as a get out of jail card.
20. Conversely, those who attempt to explain the truth carefully and diligently are tarnished in a strategy of guilt by association.
21. The result has been that the MSM have been reluctant to correct their errors.
22. Yet the truth is relatively easy to assemble from the sources that are open to all.
23. That said, it takes time given the multitude of voices that have to be sifted through – most especially by those many pro-Israel activists who supplied the MSM with ancient materials.
24. Worst of all, the uncomfortable truth lurks in the background that the agenda behind the campaign to smear Corbyn was motivated to provide a smokescreen for the violence in Gaza about which the pro-Israel hawks (but not the MSM) were fully conscious.
25. Man hates nothing more than being in the wrong, and so, rather than square up to the demands of journalistic conscience, the MSM finds it easier to ignore the evidence.
26. In this way the original sin of dishonesty becomes institutionalised.
RE 11 – Isn’t being demonised or marked out by such an influential lobby a ‘for us or against us’ call to NOT be seen to associate or support Corbyn and thus isolate him in the circles of political influence as a marked man?
For such ‘public vilification’ can be directed to anyone’s person, social standing and career.
While those taking offence and crying ‘foul!’ may present themselves as being morally righteous – is this not simply an act of an ‘unchallengeable power’ ?
The same as can dehumanise and violate Palestinians with international impunity – because no one can do anything about it, for to speak out even in the most measured terms is to risk attracting penalty.
Hi
Whether Israel, or whether the pro-Israel groups, I think that an influential lobby was behind the attacks. And as I think you are saying, it’s “for us or against us” (friends versus enemies).
Let me put it this way. What were the real anxieties of the UK Jewish community (or the “establishment”) at the time of Corbyn’s election. I don’t believe there was a whiff of antisemitism! I think that the fear was that Corbyn might put in question the legitimacy of Israel given its racist behaviour and its hardline appraoch to Hamas. This might lead to BDS becoming mainstream. And if violence was to flare up again as it had done a year back (in 2014) then Corbyn might well be the only voice denouncing such violence. He would be in his element, and enjoy support on the street. He represented a very real threat to such people.
That was the challenge. The response? A summer of madness! Gaga! In this way the smears could act as a smokescreen. How on earth they got away with it I don’t know, but I think they did!
Now, I have 50 pieces on this that I put up on my academic site in the last 6 months. They’re free, and whether or not you think they are “quality street” they are made for sharing!
https://www.academia.edu/38173810/Fifty_Essays_on_MuralGaga
If you want to hold that there is no such thing as “truth” all that’s left is to wander in a fog of subjective relativism, dominated by rampant Egoism.
Like Humpty Dumpty “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
If a “truth” is just what the writer says it is, but is also what I personally say it is – where are we left in order to deal with reality.?
Truth is used to refer to objective reality in opposition to a subjective fanciful imagery.
If I, in actual, demonstrable fact, hit the writer on the head with a lump of iron, but say he fell over, one is “truth” i.e. refers to reality, the other is an untruth i.e. made up fiction.
Try and get rid of that, and you end up as the AngloEuro civilisation has – collapsing in a sea of subjective Egoism and going rapidly completely mad.
Yes.
Absurd to make truth in our own image and then pronounce it dead.
But that IS how we deny or kill our own awareness of true to raise a mind unlike and apart.
With truth ‘dead’, dead ideas can seem to live – and so truth must be kept dead for survival’s necessity.
There is no war on reality in truth, but only war on our conscious capacity to recognize and accept truly.
A self at war with itself is indeed setting and living out the question ‘who pays the sacrifice?’ by which the dominant ‘survives’.
And so ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, will never put Humpty together again’ – because the impossible never happened. Truth did not ‘fall’ and shatter, but from the false flag of denied and projected culpability – our sense of self is shattered and lost to the threat of division and pain of loss.
When terror sets the terms, the truth is reduced to wanting to live – but when such a free willingness is forced through a mind of denial – we generate our personal and collective experience of a world of war and lies.
If truth is already true, but denied recognition and acceptance in our minds, then our minding is being given to untruth, WANTED and believed true, and defended against threat of change as if ourself.
Truth is not threatened by illusions, but my (our) awareness of truth is, whenever I engage in deceit by reaction to illusions as true.
Recognition, acknowledgement, acceptance and extending or sharing in discernment of truth is the only life we have. All the rest is made of fear.
Fear is associated with distortion, denial and deceit by which to hide the feared true.
Herod represents ‘power-in-the-world’ and the love of truth is represented in the ‘Christ-child’.
But this is pointing to what we are identifying and accepting as our self, our relationships and our world and not to idealised forms of masking minds.
The reaction of attack as vengeance is the mind in form. Discerning the truth as a desire for correction or undoing of the false is a different ‘question and answer’ than determining the ‘truth’ as the distribution of guilt (worthlessness) and punishment (denial).
Like a game of ‘pass the parcel’ everyone automatically seeks to evade or escape the penalty of guilt – excepting they refuse to play the game of ‘who pays’.
Wholeness is not a thing in itself – but in all its ‘parts’ whole. This is what lies forgotten in a mind of the intent to add to or take away from truth – and the futility of its a-tempt to make real.
Self inflation comes before a fall. But the mind focuses on the violator or non-supportive ‘betrayal’ of its fantasy self as the ’cause’ of its sense of denial – instead of its OWN thought – and feel righteous in both attacking – and hiding the attack within a weave of self-justifications. As a conditioning – this rewards attack with a strengthened sense of self in power – gotten from judging and attacking others. Nothing could be further from the truth. But we have all learned it.
But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.
~ Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Since that episode when the guardian had their hard drives smashed up by, if I recall correctly, the ‘intelligence’ agencies their reporting has followed a downhill trajectory becoming yet another outlet in the MSMfold, spewing the usual, accepted narrative. Am I wrong?
Of course – the excellent, liberal editor has been replaced.
Good stuff CJ Hopkins.
Although I remain convinced there is an objective world and real objective conditions (the object of empirical science) the human or world we live in as individual humans is not objective in that sense; it is subjective; it is noospheric.
Human knowing is inherently subjective and interpretational and the ruling elites get to determine the narrative and the consensus reality and truth of the human world.
I was just watching some of the pomp & ceremony of the Bush funeral and it signified to me the real order of things as the elites honor a loyal operative who served their interests in some of the highest offices of Western power. The talk of a humble and saintly christian soul was impossible to reconcile with my own personal truth about the evil activities of George Bush and the millions of lives he was involved in killing or harming during his adult life.
I am well past the outrage I once felt about all this. I no longer want to upset or disturb the sleeping masses. I have abandoned hope of people as they say waking up. As a heretic I accept the futility of objectiing; but I will not cease to in my own quiet way.
Whilst being a pleb and not articulate enough to air my stance, reading this article reminds me of Foucault’s discourse theories and the Regime of Truth.
Always a breath of fresh air to read off-guardian and its comment section. Bravo!
Taff
The truth exists independently of our opinion.
Whether we think our truth is the truth is a bit like Schroedinger opening the box.
Until you open the box you just don’t know.
When you do – you know.
The Guardian et al don’t want to open the box.
Truth then, is neither our thinking, nor any opinion given power or identified with emotional attachment.
Truth simply is.
And always already is.
But the boxing of ‘is’ into image and concept, imagines and thinks and feels to ‘open’ a private version or kingdom of its own self differentiation, as a ‘personal and partial truth’ that is taken from wholeness in forms and patterns of association.
Such ‘conditioning’ is then the mind of its perceiver, replacing or covering truth as if to have opposed, denied or killed it. The ‘new’ truth sees nothing as it is – but through a defended sense of a separate ‘whole’ in a world of separate wholes or others, who are ‘seen’ for what can be gotten from them, or as threat or rival that would take this fragile but heavily defended ‘truth’ from you. And so the world of struggle in shifting illusions of power in which the protection of the box is paramount as the delay of the inevitable opening of the box.
The framing of the mind becomes invisible by its habit of use – as ‘subconscious routine and reaction’. Within the box, its framing as ‘usurper of truth’ (narrative continuity control) can and must be asserted continuously by recycling ‘new’ forms of masking war and slavery as freedom, or indeed as the only and necessary truth.
The ingenuity of invention in cunning and guile is applied to a broad spectrum ‘dominance’ so as to maintain the subjection that is held to be the power and protection that saves us from our sin, but only as a protection racket that demands ever higher tax for ever more toxic guilts – packaged in forms that appeal to self-inflation or whose framed choice seems the lesser evil.
If your life or that of another, depends upon hiding truth – would you?
If a false sense of hidden self running as ‘survival’ demands sacrifice of the living – would you?
Manufacturing truth is the ongoing ‘mind’ of denial or self-evasion.
The witness of those who release it is of opening to freedom.
But such freedom is feared as slavery by the addiction to a private limited responsibility – that has forgotten that the nature of truth is being – not demand for sacrifice – and therefore Truth demands nothing – being free of illusions that demand sacrifice to seem true.
Mis-taken identity is not destroyed or punished as sinful (irrevocable guilt), but corrected, undone or released of the belief that it could be effected in Fact. Alignment in truth is not unlike singing or making music, because the instrument is not the cause’ but the channel of the expression or translation of the formless to the realm of tangibility – whose forms are themselves a vehicle of the qualities that they carry or convey to the recognition of such qualities as the ‘matching resonance’ of the receiver.
There is a total communication within which we are each and all uniquely integral that we can know our being as, and within. Giving and receiving are one – but as an extension of one and not a static image of possession mistaken as a basis for lack and loss and therefore defence and deceit against impossible odds – by which to assert ever more impossibly self-conflicted self-limitation in polarised paralysis.
Perhaps limiting our mind to the ‘robot age’ is an appropriate symbol for the initial mis-identification of disconnected thinking – as a mind in its own self-referencing spin given truth by the sacrifice of life to illusion. The wages of error is correction. Give truth to what is truly worthy of being shared true.
What we give in thought, word and deed – is the measure of what we receive – but what we hide from truth as if to protect ourself, runs as unmindful thought, word and deed to brings the reinforcements of guilts and fears. Curiosity and desire for truth is SOME stirring of recognition that what was given status of truth is partial or false. But this desire is denied by the assignment or projection of personal guilt that replaces a true desire with a self-vindicating compulsion. As if someone else must be wrong and punished for ‘truth’ to be wrested from them and set back in our own image.
We are created in the image and likeness of truth – not the other way round. Our creative nature is fulfilled in extending LIKEWISE and not as an oppositional defiance or dominance.
Truly shared wellbeing is not found by controlling the supply of the living waters of true need met.
Truth is Everything and Illusion, nothing. Mixing them up is not truly possible – excepting as illusion of truth – be-lived, suffered and died as real.
How to tell the difference, is from wanting to know the difference, instead of wanting them the same in the form of insoluble doublethink. Self-honesty is ‘dangerous’ to a false and forced sense of self-control. Hence the ‘manufacture of truth’ which against is a self contradictory impossibility – of invitation to doublethink or indeed the ‘blanking of the capacity to think in a genuinely connected way.
@ Ken Kenn,
And here is WHY no one want s to open the box.
‘Hasbara Provocateurs, Shills and Trolls.’
I concur with CJ: there is only one story, though it has a plurality of meanings …approximately 7.3 billion meanings: each designated a ‘self’, ‘person’ or ‘being’ (atma-drsti, pudgala, svabhava). Only this story is not dictated by ‘Them’ to ‘Us’ – ‘They’ are ‘Us’. The differentiation is an Otherisation (dualistic linguistic differentiation: the major structural byline of the story). The processual personification (skandha-uppadana) creates a ‘self-view’ (atma-drsti): and co-creates the Other. The Other is the realm of sensate form (rupa-skandha). Rupa is neither fully material or immaterial (in a Western sense), but form that can be sensed (Otherised, objectified and reified: another structural byline, or Leitmotif of the story). Self and world (rupa) specify each other. Self and world are co-dependant, co-evolved, and co-mutually arising (pratityasamutpada). Bio-cognitively: self and world are “structurally coupled” [Varela; Maturana: Santiago Theory]. The five senses; their internal and external sense bases (dhatu, ayatana, Indraya); and their integrative function (mental process; manas, mano, Sadayatana) constitute Sabba – the All.
Everything beyond the Sabba existential (the event: This! – the lived experience) would be and is “mere talk” (= ‘vaccu vattu’ [Lusthaus]) …a story we tell together: a co-telling and a co-doing. A story we tell ourselves and each other about the lived experience. Rather than rely or prioritise the lived experience (enculturate life): we rely on the reflexive and reflective discourse about the lived experience (enculturated half-life, or ‘near-life-experience’). This is the basis of all deception, including self-deception. The story is more real than the lived experience. Together we put forth an interactive karmic (karma means ‘action’: not retribution) near-life telling of reality. That is our one story.
Rupa-skandha is form (objectified, Otherised, phenomenological form): the other four skandhas (vedana; samjna; samskara; vijnana) are nama (name, nominalised, semio-linguistic). Together they become nama-rupa: the all (sabba) encompassing discourse …the story. That is how truth is manufactured …only I’m not sure ‘truth’ is the best fit signifier.
I do not expect anyone to believe me: but the greatest story is the one that cannot be told. Only, I just did tell. (It is not language; it is not other than language). Which puts us at a disadvantage. How can we replace the pan-historic, enculturated, inter-generational story of atma-drsti (the self-view) with the greatest story that cannot be fully told? This is the cultural aporia. We can’t: we have to ‘fake it ’till we make it’ …by a more expansive, interconnected, interbeing telling of the atma-drsti saga.
The moral to my little tale is that the story is micro-adjusted a billion times a second …in ways we can be cognisant of. We do not have to have the story told for us. We can tell the new stories ourselves. ‘They’ may control the information flows that influence the story; but we control the consciousness. A new world is possible today.
Consider: ‘They’ will never let go of any measure of control they may have over ‘Us’ (devolution). ‘They’ will never have it taken away (revolution). The only way I can see is if we move the story on beyond entrancement, deception and manipulations of the dualistic story (evolution to a holistic story). That requires, not so much a new chapter of the self-saga of humanity, as a new book. The end of history precedes the beginning of life.
Nice conclusion. Thanks.
Does that mean, if we elevate our mind above the toxic rhetoric, ‘they’ become meaningless and irrelevant?!
When you recognize the meaningless as meaningless, you are already free of it.
While looking for meaning in it, or taking meaning from opposing it, it serves purpose for you.
In this sense you are the employer of the purpose and meanings you accept.
This is your freedom, along with the freedom to recognize and release what no longer serves who you accept yourself to be.
While simple, this does not assign fixed ‘meanings’ to the world or to others and then suffer them as real. What you choose to see is of course what you are looking for.
In toxic self-judgement of a inner hatred, do many seek outside themselves for completion of love by possession or power by domination or peace by denial, so as to abate or escape a ‘wrongness’ of self, and so WANT to see what is wrong with everyone who does not fit or reinforce their fantasy in a positive sense. Thus they find self-reinforcement for a self-evasion by negative feedback – including the sense of being subjected to it against their will.
What we choose to see in others is what we then gift them, They may or may not accept it, but we cannot escape what we wanted true for them. Thus, release and be released is a cancelling of debts relative to our own presence. Debts in the sense of unrequited hates, resentments and grievances.
Living in toxic sludge can of course be personally and socially normalised and any other possibility romanticised as some special state of consciousness – as if such a judgemental mind can be relieved of its consequence without attending and releasing the cause.
Manufacture of a substitute reality is invoked by the failure of the truth of our being to satisfy, as so a sense of self lack makes a mask and masks a making. Because toxic emotional states are normalised in human society, anyone ‘coming in’ has to find some way to adapt or survive lovelessness – often by sacrificially taking on of guilts, roles or supports for their family, because love without a developed mind doesn’t differentiate but accepts.
Because society is manipulating its own toxic debts into complex instruments, it ‘lives’ more in the manipulative than in the true present as the carrot and stick of a psychic sense of survival that is founded in old patterns of coping strategy that – if re-evaluated, would be found meaningless or no longer relevant to a more integrated sense of self.
Thoughtful and sensible post. Thanks binra.
Indeed, well fitting description of today’s sociery: : “toxic emotional states are normalised in human society”
* today’s society
Stop calling the Guardianista ‘lefties’! They are nothing of the sort.
The Graun, New Statesman, et al have been brought under the establishment umbrella.
I’m a leftie, Corbynista- An admirer of Assange, Pilger, etc. And want May to have to personally pay the 15mill quid its cost to police the embassy.
As near as I can determine, you are the Leftie and they are the Liberals.
Fortunately your brief comment is so brief as to contain only a brief fragment of ad hominem opinion, and , nothing else.
well, liberal used to mean something very different. Now it means soft right wing.
No that’s pretty much what it has always amounted to. The petit bourgeoise.
Was the Liberal movement not the idea of shifting or expanding Sovereignty from the Aristocracy to the People? At the time of such cruelty and indifference to the people from the then ruling classes?
Is the history of human kind to be overlaid by smug and cynical opinion?
Political ideas tend to rise in reaction and then mutate or change when the context of their rising is no longer active.
That’s why an opposition never gets into power – because of course they are no longer in opposition but defending from it.
What does liberal mean now? Anything and nothing it would seem.
In its name or rather as neo liberal ideas is the extending of false rights, and nurture and support fof a false sense of entitlement that draws the unwary into being used by state-backed power and drawn into dependence of a captive identity. Once power is attained, it is defended against loss. The state itself is lured and captured by corporate and transnational interests to work against the interests of its people.
Power of a personal capacity corrupts the personality.
One of the easiest ways to tell truth from fiction is to think in terms of screenplays. Screenplays make boring reading because the text is of necessity simplified, its just part of the picture the director is weaving into the story. Since they’re simple they tend to present things in black and white, stylized stories that form one of a very few basic narratives. If you read a news story that fits into a similar narrative format then its almost certainly manufactured. Real history is more complex and less clear cut (although sometimes the truth can be stranger than anything a screenwriter could dream up).
So taking that Assange story as an example, since it reads like a James Bond novel its likely to be at best a mixture of conjecture and exaggeration. You’ve got the generic Bad Guys — invariably “Russians” these days (although the Chinese can stand in at a pinch) — who are controlled by some Mr. Big from his volcanic island (or the Kremlin — same difference). Whatever really happened has got subsumed to a narrative, a preformed idea of how things are expected to turn out. (Just as in a fictional tale Our Hero inevitably wins through in the end.)
I know that Hilary Clinton was seen as a warmonger by some people in middle Europe, they felt she was someone who would be “most likely to start World War 3”. Trump was perceived as a pragmatist, a person who would put business ahead of politics. Since those middle Europeans are stuck between NATO and Russia its not surprising that they would favor a Trump presidency. As it happens, and just as I thought, they were seriously mistaken. US government isn’t the ‘follow my leader’ game it is in some countries, its a form of organized anarchy where policy is dominated more often and not by money. Anyway I think they now know better — backing Trump won’t change US policy but it will make it a whole lot more unpredictable. As for the whole Russia collusion thing I think its mostly hot air, its unimportant compared to the role that globalized money plays in national politics. I hope Muller’s investigation shines some light on this.
So the Guardian manufactures truth? SO the Grauniad is little different from every other organ of news, be they mainstream or alternative.
For although it isn’t an original idea by any means, it is very clear that every one of us manufactures our own personal version of truth and that we select the organs of news that most reflect the world that we would wish to believe in. In that sense there is no such thing as truth but only many subjective truths. There is little in our own worlds that can be seen to conform to reality in any objective manner. How could it be otherwise when Mephistopholes could say in Dr Faustus ‘why this is hell, nor am I out of it’, whilst a Buddhist might say that if we could only see it the phenomenal world is one of primordial purity.
In many ways it is a sad realisation that the world and what we see in it is simply a reflection of the chaos of our own internal worlds and the delusions that arise therefrom.
Our personal, internally held truth has little impact on the world at large. When a discourse is started and enough people of ‘professional’ standing throw their weight behind it that discursive formation becomes a Regime of Truth. Ergo manufactured truth. And that can have a profound impact on the world.
You are here talking of narrative assertions or beliefs as truth?
Of course you can fight over that as if that settles anything – other than shared belief that fighting settles anything.
You only meet the world through who you accept yourself to be.
You only experience the world that such self-definitions give you and that includes the responses you draw from others.
I see that me mask over truth in all sorts of way and for different reasons that all have fear in common.
Are we then afraid of fears that must be hidden? Or are we identified in such fears as our ‘person’ and defended or masked against a feared truth? Is truth made the Big Fear as the means by which a person can cope, manage, survive, find acceptance, or some sense of belonging in the collective social human world?
The belief that you embody in telling the world what it is and will be, is the same force that tells you and conforms you to it.
The idea of changing our beliefs can be superficially faked – as if we merely add on new beliefs and make them true, which will only seem to work if there is an emotional intensity or investment – but these are the attempt to get something we lack, or to get away from something lacking in ourself.
There is a different quality to beliefs that rise from an inner self-honesty in that they are acted from rather than needing self reinforcement.
Thus we can bring wholeness to our relationships rather than using relationships to fill a sense of lack or fantasy roleplay. Society can be said to be engaged in fantasy roleplay, where the fantasy turns to nightmare in which to be trapped, disempowered, and subject to tyranny. Shifting forms of attempts to redistribute the fear and pain of nightmare operate the ‘narrative control’ of the dominant belief system.
Currently, the belief that there IS no truth alive, makes dead ‘truths’ in substitution for life, as systems of definition and control. Dead truths maintain an identity of managed reality in the dead world to which our self-attack condemns us. No amount of injections, or interventions in a dead world will bring it to life – but dead ‘truths’ can seem to live by triggering fear in reaction and thus a ‘motivating’ force that can be frames as ‘saving from a greater evil’ and thus a sense of feeling some sense of personal ‘impact’ or social existence gotten from the evil.
Manipulation of fear and division is not manufacturing truth, but illusion to replace the working truth of a self honesty that such fear and division is a genuine call for healing or truing up in ourselves, rather than a need to ‘get rid of it’ by denials and diversions and dissociations of social masking.
Regardless the ‘stories’ being made, the underlying energetic is what is actually going on – allowing that a large part of the ‘energetic’ is in fact the failure to truly feel our feeling being, or know our purpose.
I can see this as a demand for unconsciousness – manufactured by maintaining conflict – that will take its due regardless what is given it – excepting perhaps a true acceptance in which it finds some basis from which to open communication rather than ‘deny all incoming’. The nature of a communication is not in the dark tricks of persuasion but in an open field where being seen or listened to is not a sense of being demanded of or manipulated. There is recognisably truth in freedom to be.
Now there is the basis for giving or extending truth to the world rather than seeking it where it cannot be found. It takes one to know one. Wherever you go – there you are. Such law or nature of being can work negatively if acting from a negative, fearful or lacking self definition.
‘Truth’, unlike news, information or even facts, is immutable.
Truth, like Love and Life, is here now.
Truth is born with us and dies with us. Everything else is ‘interesting’ or ‘educational’ but is not the Truth.
There is Truth and there is truth. All truth is manufactured. What matters is its impact on the individual, the collective, the world. Point being, nothing is true…
But you do not act from ‘nothing’ or believe ‘nothing’ so much as hide from what you accept by un-personing your true motivations.
If nothing we THINK is true – then you have the basis to disregard thinking and let truth show you who you are – because the truth does not make you free so much as show you – you are free.
Freedom may seem threatening to a sense of command and control – even if only a bubble reality, and so it may seem like a paralysis or death to the ‘mind of thinking’. So don’t think unless the thought flows with the movement of your true desire.
True desire is felt in the heart when the mind of false desires is left unattended.
Of course, no one – nor I can tell you what is true – because that is your right and power to give as a true expression of creation. For no one creates their existence regardless the mind of manufactured thinking that seeks to cover it. But we can give as we in truth receive, by not giving power or belief investment to false narrative. It is enough to withdraw investment. Life does the rest. To try to get rid of the false is to give it power – and secretly use it as a source of power.
So there are ‘truths’ in the mind and the world that may seem to conflict and compete. But what is that to anyone who is listening for the true of their being?
The heart and mind are master and servant, but in this world the roles are reversed, such that the mind confines and defines the heart in diminished and divided terms that the heart accepts as its human condition as guilty or unworthy. Indeed,
“There is no heart! Its NOTHING! Nothing but a pump!”
There is no limit to the pride and arrogance of the unfeeling mind – but the willingness of the heart to suffer it.
Assange isn’t ‘done for’ by any means. Extradition to the United States isn’t a mere formality at all. First, if the Americans want him extradited they will have to begin a legal process in the UK and the courts and judges are unlikely to submit to a request coming from Trump’s USA which most of them loathe. It’s going to be a long and complex legal battle. There’s also the question of the death penalty. In theory Assange risks execution for treason or espionage, but he’s not an American citizen, so this is problematic too. The UK courts are not going to simply hand him over to the Americans. It could take years. The Americans have to be careful not to make Assange look like a political prisoner as this would indicate that the entire case against Assange has been political from the very beginning and public opinion could easily swing in favour of Assange making extradition even harder.
All isn’t lost, even if he’s forced out of the embassy. Then the next stage of the battle will begin. It won’t be the end, just a new phase. And that’s even before one factors in a meltdown of the UK’s political system and a new government led by Corbyn taking over from the Conservatives.
We live in a post truth era. The truth is whatever the Deep State and powerful vested interests wish it to be and find convenient at any point in time. But there is nothing new in this. Think Tonkin Gulf, JFK, Operation Northwoods, USS Liberty, Operation Gladio, Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof, Iraq Incubator Babies, 9/11, Iraq WMD, Syrian Gas Hoaxes, David Kelly, Russiagate, Skripal, countless other lies and false flags peddled by the Fake News MSM, the list is endless. Or you can go further back to “Remember The Maine”, the Lusitania, Bayonetted-Belgian-Babies, Raped-Belgian-Nuns, and Human-Bodies-Turned-Into-Soap fairy stories.
We have been lied to consistently over the generations. How much of the accepted historical record is actually true? You can’t take anything at face value. What about the Holocaust? Is that just a fabrication from beginning to end? Why should we believe that? They have lied to us about everything else, so why should that be any different? What about “Global Warming”? Is that just a hoax? Why should we uncritically accept anything peddled by the dirty, lying MSM?
Hang on Mark… we live… in truth!
Everything else is our own nightmare.
And is not where the true of being is found.
It may seem that you are the vicim of the lies of others but for reasons not apparent, it was your choice or acceptance that made them your reality.
Of course that choice was what you now see as ‘unconscious’ because its nature was to hide.
What is a lie but a ‘hiding’?
The relentless attempts to get Holocaust mentioned on every page, site, talk show, or game show is beginning to offset the innate morbid fascination it engenders. But Mark, no matter some of it comes from the mouths of inveterate liars, it is not something that can or should be doubted.
I’m just saying from their proven track record, anything is possible. You can’t take anything at face value any more. If they could do a 9/11, they could manufacture a similar hoax about anything. Believe nobody. Trust nobody. We are living in a world of lies, and this has been going on for decades. We can only guess how much they have got away with before the advent of alternative media.
I agree with that entirely. Trying to guess at the truth has gone from a parlour game to a very grim reality. Will this Jeff Epstein case unfold in the general direction of unmasking what is going on ? Or will the the 26 visits by Bill Clintons penis to Epstein’s tiny island of pedophilia get buried once again?
Truth is given. But in giving something ELSE, we received something else and reacted as if our truth is threatened with attack, division, loss and death, or in guilt as as if a lie has possessed or become us, for which we are damned.
And so everything is mustered to defend against the ‘violator’, the terror or the evil ‘without’ and everything is purposed to keep hidden the feared lack of legitimacy that merits and expects rejection, and so rejects first, as a necessity of survival in the terms such a split mind dictates and serves.
The above may not see to connect with a world of lies or of a world arising from lies.
But looking in the frame of lies will never uncover or restore a true appreciation.
The lie and the father of it, is a wish that truth be different than it is.
This indeed may start out as a parlour game of a wishful imagination given attention, but in forgetting it was a game, is the investment of a captured identity – or rather, of giving ourself to the defence of an investment in fear, hidden in guilt and protected by hate that brings forth evils as a means to keep out a greater threat.
I could have written to the worldly situation, but the world is a world in grievance, in dread or terror and in vengeance. I do not feel these to extend our truth, but our great fear of it – or of what we believe we have made it. Grim and terrible indeed. Yet is this the ‘god’ or power we would accept and align in as our own?
Lies are made to protect or hide a fear, that then become a mask over fear driven and hateful intent, that further become the insistence that the act was forced on it by the offence of the ‘other’ and is thereby self-vindicative as claiming the right to live upon or or stand over another’s death or debasement – instead of being so humiliated.
‘Manufacturing truth’ is double-speak!
It is lies that are manufactured to replace or substitute for truth.
Creation already is. Your creation is already given. Giving as you in truth receive, is dependent upon honesty of acceptance. An unwatched mind can take offence from its image of self and world meeting a lack of support, recognition or rejection and react as if it is in fact attacked!
Our giving sets the measure of our receiving, regardless how ingeniously we manipulate our accounts.
So what then is my part in the entanglement of lies that wearily winds a world to its own destruction in misery and loss? Is it not to undo, take back or release the fantasies of self-specialness that make the judgement of hate both real and appealing in my own thought? Or at least to own what is mine as well as what I have taken in that is not, so as to regain choice as the capacity to accept the true and let go the false – which has no support but that I feed it.
Our awareness of creation can be distorted by minds that ‘share’ the idea of specialness as a private sense of creation. This is ‘our world’ – regardless ‘who started it’ – it takes two to tango.
To hate the hateful does not to love restore.
“To hate the hateful does not to love restore”
… unless by by such self-honesty or stark exposure in feeling and thought are we then moved to no longer choose to join with, participate in or ‘share’ the hateful. For where hate is not, love must be recognisably present.
This is the greater fear that calls on hate to ‘save it’.
Who in the pains of a separation (or communication breakdown), has not called on hate to ‘distance’ from hurt and then looked for the hateful in the broken ‘love’ to support the separating?
And who in extremity of pain – be it physical, emotional, mental or of course all three, has not sworn NEVER AGAIN!
There are no ‘walls’ or partitions to mind but what we accept and live by.
But because mind is a tool or instrument of conscious focus, it can always be revisited and refreshed in its nature or purpose as the conscious extension of being.
There is no-thing before or after the atemporal lived experience. The elementary binary discrimination – BEFORE/AFTER – is retrospectively applied. For the human observer: creation cannot precede the lived experience – no-thing can – except that binary discrimination causes it to be. All human knowledge, including self-knowledge (atmabodha; gnosis), is built from elementary binary differentiation and discrimination. manufactured (tempororalised) AFTER the fact of the lived experience.
This is not BigB’s verbiage. Listen to a piece of music. Now think about listening to a piece of music. Or try to describe the music. The music is the extra-lingual experience. When we try to assimilate the ‘meaning’ or emotion of the music (described to the self-view (atma-drsti) by the self-view) …all sense or meaning of the music is lost. We incorporate a linguistic impression of the music into the like, dislike, and neutral (vedana) complexes of the self-view. The music is categorised into our web of associations (samjna) …”this piece reminds me of …”; “my mum loves this song”; “god, I hate gangsta rap!”; etc; etc. We ascribe meaning according to our binary model of the self-view. We manufacture a ‘truth’ …it is not given. If so, who is the giver?
And ‘truth’ is a binary differentiation, made by? There can be no monadic, singular, mind-independent (a priori) quality nominalised as ‘Truth’. As soon as you manufacture a truth, you also manufacture a lie. If the truth is your truth: whose are the lies?
Of COURSE BigB, there is no time but the presence – (or better the verb: ‘presencing’ or be-ing) – apart from the story or theme unfolding as a fragmented perception. A story in which you are demonstrably participating with me.
The mind or focus within the temporal sense can only perceive what happenED and is unaware of what IS (happening) except as the narrative interpretation of self-definition running AFTER the event or indeed overlaid upon the event. Hence an exclusive identity in the temporal is aligned with the attempt to predict and control what otherwise feels naked or powerless. You can only BE the event itself – which to the unprepared is feared as loss of self (life).
Lest we BE STILL and KNOW. But such knowing is a transparency of what is usually taken to be self and world and cannot be meaningfully described. This IS You. Love can and does reveal itself to its Own – (as You do), and so the nature of a transcendence is not a ‘nothing’ – but simply out of range of the mental structure of the physically based personality structure – which is made rather than created – that is – it is the attempt to manufacture truth from the identification in body terms – or indeed the illusion of power in the world. Which is the exchange of self-illusion for awareness of ‘Everything’.
That Event is in no way separate from Cause, is perhaps a better way of seeing Cause and Effect (or Father/Son) as The Law or Nature of Creation rather than the representations in temporal experience that are perspectives of a conceptual and perceptual focus.
There is no thing – period! BUT the belief in separated things is the belief in self as thing; as self-in-and-of-itself.
And what you give is the measure of your receiving – or what you teach is the measure of your learning.
And so the belief in a separate space and time-bound self is very real to the mind of such belief – as behaviours readily testify. So much and so fearfully so as to render it a jealous ‘god’ admitting no other BUT life under death – as a private separate life that is founded upon the ruling out of a greater Communication for its ‘self survival’. Thus it secretly lives upon the denial of Life – feared as death – and as a reversal of consciousness.
An intellectual recognition of no thing separate within a totality of relationship is not the Realisation, but can inspire curiosity to embrace and integrate rather than reactively enact a ‘defence’ we take as our self until we observe it.
You are trying to tell the truth what it is.
I am inviting you to let it tell you who you are – along with your brother. For we cannot ‘remember’ who we are alone, when ‘separateness’ is the condition of forgetting and covering a true awareness. Not of actually becoming trapped in our own thought and experience.
The idea of ‘joined’ minds is not of separate minds communicating but of being moved as one – in sync as one sharing purpose as one. Nothing is violated for truth to be itself but the barriers we made to block or deny it – and this is a matter of willingness to let them go rather than a breakout or breakthrough by some egoic force or imagined capacity.
The holocaust makes people so afraid they don’t even dare to investigate. Big brother is watching.
Does it? or do you or we use it for such a purpose?
Everything can be seen in terms of the USE to which it is being put.
But phishing works on the premise that one can pass off the false in the forms associated with true or the wish or fear it be true.
Form itself is not the determiner of reality.
Regardless what something seems to be, what we use it FOR is all the meaning it holds for us.
To be awake is not to be in judgement over anything or anyone, but to know our purpose and live it.
I didn’t embezzle, and if I DID embezzle, clearly someone set me up. To embezzle. To make me look bad. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The first order of the new government should be that the Leveson Inquiry is completed and its recommendations are fully and immediately implemented.
The Guardian would be a lot more careful as would all the rest including social media.
Truth is power or in this age of psyops-a-ga-ga it’s become – powering the narrative is truth – cos, well I say so.
The hyper-drive of faking the facts, as if that will freak out the noise of the so called fakers is proving a little unreliable. The quality is somewhat lacking.
The Guardian’s revamp based on the graphic design of the Beano [a comic I loved] tells us loads about how the Oxbridge fifth [filth?] column and and the ruling class, miss-read the labouring class’s insight and wit and that somehow they can transplant it with cleaver paid for stooges and shills herding them with Denis the Menace antics of Putin, Baby-face Finlyson Trump and the Bash Street Kids trying to revive Old Labour from the New/old Neo Liberal brand.
As for Schroedinger’s cat, well we had WMSM taken in by that with the Babchenko stunt. Which was a fake news story which double bluffingly turned out to be true!
So was the Babchenko story really dead or alive? Well it all depends on your perspective…
‘These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father’…’thy word is truth’ John 1/17:17
Truth – to be itself – is beyond editing, and therefore conflict.
Truth is neither threatened by illusion or mocked – but our awareness of truth can be lost or rather, covered over by lies and reactions to lies.
And so conflict is the denial of truth upon which a ‘self is made up’ or raised in place of true and from the belief in the attack being true. The self of any ‘war on perceived and believed evil’ is fathered by it. making it real by the very assumption it must be defended against rather than seen truly.
Lies do not compete with truth – for they have none, but the co-fusing of or weaving of lies into truths, is the liability of taking ‘truth’s out of their living context. Symbols, images. concepts and stories of truth are a kind of shorthand reference that becomes a shortcircuit replacement, that is entirely corruptible or open to abuse – and therefore appealing to the wish to make truth in our own image – rather than recognize ourselves and each other in truth.
Narrative continuity is that aspect of the mind attending to the persistence of an object world in the terms and framing of a subjective adaptation. Narrative control is effectively a survival reflect for a separated sense of mind-in-body or self as hidden and separated from truth in a private mind – made so by the body and its world.
The private agenda of the Body Politic – as the mind that seeks to maintain possession and control, operates in the same way as our own, with different compartments and levels that are hidden from or unable to understand each other and thus operating apart – excepting in aligning against the ‘enemy’ that unites them all – which is truth, misperceived or unrecognized.
The command and control mind WAS limited in its effects on Earth by distances that technology has erased, so as to be checked and limited in its operation. The Internet as an information ‘explosion’ temporarily opened the mind to a greater field of perspective that re-enacts the fear of loss of power and reenacts the filtering distortions and denials of the ‘identity’ given and received from possession and power, taken out of living context.
But whenever such events are illuminated in our awareness, we have a portal of choice, through which to disinvest the identity of private possession, and power, in exchange for the true to be restored us.
“What is truth?” Is a trick question that the mind asks itself, so as to persist in its own thinking in place of true receipt and extension or witness.
While the mind is employed or used as the determiner or judge of truth, the ‘matrix’ of a self-apart operates its ‘survival’ at expense of life – of the true of life. Of life truly lived and known and shared.
The manufacture of reality is simply the re-programming of mind. Experience is subjective, and the result of subjecting Life or Existence to definition – or judgement. Attempts to change our experience within the frame of the experience are futile and reinforce as sense of being trapped in external causative conditions. Observing or witnessing our experience -in act or in place – is the transcendence of the character painted by its reality, to the freedom to bring curiosity to the underlying beliefs and definitions that generate such results.
”People already know the truth … the official truth, which is the only truth there is.”
It is not the only truth there is. There is what I would call ‘popular truth’ which is not the dominant narrative, but the sort of truth you would commonly come across in the doctor’s waiting room, in the pub, waiting at the bus stop talking to ordinary people who do not buy the establishment bullshit. The mass of people who believe that politicians, bankers, solicitors, journalists are on the make, and society is a pure racket. These truths came to seep into the mass consciousness of the people precisely through their lived experience. It didn’t come through sitting in the reading room of the British Museum.
So we have 3 kinds of truth here. Elite truth, Popular truth and Heretical truth. Whether the masses will do something about it is another question. But it seems blindingly obvious that there is a mass disenchantment of the people from their putative ‘leaders’. Just look at the voting figures and the readership of national newspapers. The gap between the misinformed and the uninformed.
In 1984 Orwell grasped this reality. There was the truth of the party contained in the articles of ingsoc. There was the truth of the underground opposition, The Brotherhood, and the truth of the Proles.
This tension between between the various concepts of truth is hardly new and there is no reason for it endure in perpetuity. It seems to be characteristic of our period that those norms and truths which were once accepted as being absolute, universal and eternal, or which were accepted with blissful unawareness of their implications are being questioned. We are witnessing not just a general distrust of the validity of the ideas themselves but also the motives of those who assert them.
@Francis Lee: “we have 3 kinds of truth here. Elite truth, Popular truth and Heretical truth. ”
Fourth kind is Actual truth: The correspondence between what is claimed to have happened and what actually happened. If what is claimed to happen actually keeps on happening regardless of whether the first 3 (ie, the Elite, the Populace or the Heretics) like it or not, then Actual truth is known as Scientific truth: What Dante in Purgatorio calls Fortuna “who goes blithely about her Heavenly business with no heed to the blessings or curses of mankind”.
Indeed so, however the Actual Truth is usually suppressed by the purveyors of the Elite truth and the Heretical truth so that it gets as little exposure as possible. The Popular truth, on the other hand, tends to be a mix of Elite, Heretical and Actual truth. The real problem comes when the Elite truth, Heretical truth and Popular truth coalesces to become Actual truth when it actually isn’t true at all. Things like Manifest Destiny fall into this category and look at how much pain that alone has caused. Then we must add the unfortunate human tendency to accept what confirms our prejudices as truth and what doesn’t as lies, something few of us are immune to.
The “actual truth”, insofar as it is not one with the speaker (e.g. that person’s own thoughts), is never guaranteed accessible. Theres no rock to stand on. Period.
Yes to that, vexarb!
Just because much or even most of what is presented to us as facts about the world and its history is a ‘story’ concocted by whichever groups is or was in power in no way undermines the real existence of objective truth.
We are not forever in a Schroedinger’s cat situation where everything is uncertain and subject to more than one possible ‘correct’ answer. We do not live in an ultimately relitavistic universe – that’s just another ‘story’ which some, including this author, choose to believe.
There is no way he can prove it.
That should of course be ‘relativistic’
Prove, no. Validate, yes. Physicists have validated the superposition of particles many times. Schroedinger’s cat is dead and alive …until we measure (determine, collapse) the superposition.
https://www.nature.com/news/physicists-snatch-a-peep-into-quantum-paradox-1.13899
Pure objectivity (observer as observer) failed as a paradigm (logical empiricism, logical positivism, analytic philosophy, scientism): but a “second order” (observer as participator) science has yet to fully take its place. Systems thinking, second order cybernetics, neurophenomenology, cognitive science, cognitive lingistics, the Santiago Theory of consciousness, are all examples of second order science. A “third order” philosophy, phenomenology, and ontology is in it’s infancy.
In defence of CJ: that’s because the story is profoundly dualistic and objective …which is why it is only a story. To show that …we need to look at the claim of “tertium non datur” no third is given. That is the Latin for TINA (there is no alternative) …which is perhaps the biggest propaganda of all.
BigB, Agreed on the empirical validation of all the paradoxes which Einstein deduced from quantum theory in an effort to prove its logical absurdity — the Laser, Probabilistic momentum exchange between radiation quanta and atoms, Quantum entanglement, and his celebrated definition of madness: “A quantum scientist repeating the same experiment and expecting a different result each time”.
But all Einstein’s theoretical paradoxes have now proved rock solidly reproducible _on average_. So reproducible _statistically_ that they can be reliably used in technology. Which means that they are _actually_ true.
I believe there is a flutter of excitement, at the moment, in mathematico-physico circles, because the quantum theory of the distribution of electronic shells in large atoms (which is random and probabilistic ) has been found to be related to the Riemann Conjecture on the distribution of Prime Numbers (than which nothing can be imagined more orderly and deterministic). It seems to me to boil down to the notion of Fair Shares: fair sharing of electrons between quantized shells on the one hand, and fair sharing of prime numbers between the ordinary numbers. Which boils down to the notion of the Justice of Zeus. I think most scientists would agree with Einstein’s Credo: “God is subtle but He is not malicious”. Scientists may not believe in Zeus, but they do believe in Justice among numbers and Justice among fundamental particles. Like the Buddha, scientists believe in Right Thinking and Right Doing.
All of which is a long way from thie present thread, which is about the concoction of crude falsehoods and the dissemination thereof among the public by cheap (though wealthy) crooks.
The empirical validation of Einstein’s disconcerting postulate (that quantal momentum exchange is a “random event”) demonstrates (contrary to Einstein’s own deepest beliefs) that God really does throw dice. But the recent discovery of a mathematical correspondence that uses Random Matrix Theory to calculate Electron Orbit Distribution (real quantal events) as well as Prime Number Distribution (theoretical deterministic order) seems to me The Justice of Zeus in Numbers. God throws dice in the real world but pure mathematics (Analytical Number Theory) suggests that His throws are fair — God’s dice are not loaded. His dice being the fundamental building blocks of bodily reality (quanta) and the fundamental building blocks of pure numbers (the primes), respectively.
I did have a real problem with Greenwald saying that the Assange/Manafort story could possibly be true and was about to write him off. If he’d used a sarcastic font, I would have wised up immediately. The Guardian lies are serious poison for those who operate within normal moral bounds.