RE: “avoiding offending people”

Do you mean treading on eggshells so as not to invite or incite a feared reaction, or conscious communication that does not engage in personal smear or attack as a personal satisfaction?

My sense of the persona is of a mask for defence – that is itself defended as part of or representing self – but self under threat.
Being right does not necessarily serve a true outcome – but more likely the false if its right is claimed upon the wrong or sin of the other – as the denial of the other – who of course may be also in confusion or conflict.

I intend to read Lippman and will see what I find.
There are cultural blindspots or indeed no-go areas that cannot be directly addressed without invoking the most primordial of defences.

The idea of working with what can be said can become the gatekeeper to an unspoken sense of what must never be said (or thought). The ‘establishment in this sense is not just its apparent ‘controllers’ but the core survival sense of a collective unconsciousness – or rather a collective agreement NOT to look there or allow into awareness – albeit each for their own reasons’.

Perhaps we each can only make the gift that we are uniquely able to give – and that what seems a failure or even betrayal is itself an education in the fall of idols or dis-illusionment in the truest sense.

If I find no match or welcome or resonance for who I am discovering and accepting myself to be – then can I move on with a blessing in the trust that what does match or resonate is still actively welcomed, or shall I play out the drama of rejection and carry its curse as if at the hand of another?

The self of the personality is predicated upon the idea of denial, deprivation and offence – and the use of victimhood as the foundation for justified attack as defence, self-vindication and victory in vengeance.

A poor workman blames his tools as an identification in helplessness hard done by.
But never for a moment does the cause of such a communication breakdown and ‘failed outcome’ leave the one who seeks to cast the blame – and even the tool – away.

The rage that can surface from a momentary exposure or leak of self-judgement is indiscriminate or blind and blinding. It is also guilt-inducing. An insane mind seeks to regain what it fears and believes lost or denied and deprives in insane ways.

Talking down an armed madman is first finding any willingness for a channel of communication as a basis through which a present relational recognition can undo an intensely driven dissociation. But there has to be the willingness to relate – rather than war.

Of course one can simply kill them or storm the siege and write of the ‘collateral’ damage as part of the mad script that runs our mind-in-denial. Or pretend to relate as a way to get a clear shot… by proffering the poison chalice to any basis for any trust to re-establish.

How does genuine communication (or relationship) know itself true?
And not merely the forms and presentations of passing off as true in mutual agreement to separate through seeming to join?

I like to remind myself that hypocrite – as used in the Bible’s NT and – meant ‘actor’. All derogatory terms tend to become shortcuts by which we simply assign blame and act out the judge. – (and find receipt in like kind).

Work for who exactly?
(Rhetorical question)

Perhaps it helps to see propaganda as the corruption of truth by distortion or indeed a false witness that of course can extend from a mistaken identity.
Extending and expressing the life we receive and share in is life being itself.

Illusions call upon defence and bait into being framed in division:

“How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger. Nor by
OPPOSING them in ANY way. Merely by letting reason tell you that they CONTRADICT reality. They GO AGAINST what must be true. The opposition comes from THEM, and NOT reality.
Reality opposes nothing. What merely is, NEEDS no defense, and offers none. Only illusions need defense, BECAUSE OF WEAKNESS. And how CAN it be difficult to walk the way of truth, when only WEAKNESS interferes? YOU are the strong ones in this seeming conflict. And you need NO defense. Everything that needs defense YOU DO NOT WANT. For anything that needs defense will WEAKEN you”. ( ~ A Course in Miracles).

The nature of the mind is the reinforcement of whatever is accepted or held there – including beliefs ABOUT the mind.

Believing our own thinking does not make it true – but does make it as if true for us while we believe it.
And when what we present to our self or others seems to pass off as effective – we identify with such a mask as our power and protection and therefore our self.

The idea ‘truth needs no defence’ needs also the reminder that our awareness of truth is easily lost to reaction, and so we need vigilance against deceit.

Regardless of what another may do or say, I am responsible for what I accept and act upon as true. So indeed those giving false witness may seem to deceive me once, as an education by which to not be taken in again. But as such an education in vigilance and love of true reveals; deceits can be very subtle.

Complex financial instruments by which to pass off toxic debt as an appreciative asset are simply normal currency in a world defending its illusions.

If I consider the outside or political nature of working with what is in terms that integrates what is with what we fear, believe and defend to be true, then there is a need for balance and communication between and among apparent differences. There is a basis in life for embracing the right of others to their own experience of life – but not as a disintegrity to the whole or the poisoning of the well from which all must partake. Order can and needs to hold the balance points of society – as in the individual, but only for a greater order to work through the conditions in which life can heal and flourish. The usurping of true governance by a top down fear of disorder sets up a self-reinforcing negative spiral that brings about the very event that it most fears – under the fragmented and dissociated beliefs it is necessary, and right in adopting any means against so evil an outcome.

The core nature of (our) deceit is fear.
Fear believed true enacts defences that reinforce or bring about the need for the fear. Yet it is the fear itself that is protected – at our expense.

When we interpret another, we can only do so through the filtering of our own minds.
The nature of the desire for a better world by exposing and overcoming evils in our midst is easily the setting up of idols, cliques and mutual identities that seem a ‘love’ but turn in an instant to hate when no longer fulfilling the conditions we set.

Taking responsibility for our self-experience is freeing ourselves from the ‘hate and blame’ mind that never actually delivers satisfaction but as a fantasy acted out or be-lived for its moment.

Can the true of life be sacrificed or denied in exchange for fantasy acted out as if upon it?

Propagation is seeding, nurturing and growing life.
Propaganda is an adulteration of false into the true – that then makes illusions of the true as the loss of the capacity to tell one from the other. For now only what is a private good and evil, runs the separate minds made different from their source and nature.

‘Be still and know’ makes no sense to any who presume to already know – and are acting out from it as true. Propaganda or self-illusion – serves the purpose we give it – until we accept another purpose in its place.

As someone with no particular view on Chomsky I have to say that I agree with Jordan. I tried to read it but gave up as it was just so tedious. After a few paragraphs I couldn’t have given a flying fig about Chomsky, Lippmann or Dr Zeuss. Actually, Dr Zeuss is a far better writer than this fellow. He probably has a point, but it is completely lost in the endless verbiage, and I just lost the will to live after a few hundred words. I then looked at the comments section and…

Well that’s why he’s currently with the World Bank!

🙂

The new kid on the block is Xi from Beijing and his (state Capitalist) comrades: stupid to ignore the next one…

Dardari is a neoliberal technocrat with no real understanding of how economies work.

When ‘bevin’ says “It seems to me that Lippman is making a fairly standard argument against democracy as ‘mob rule’,” I think that that’s a misrepresentation of what Lippmann’s constant position was. Lippmann opposed “A false ideal of democracy,” “where false unities are worshiped.” He condemned the misrepresentation both of democracy and of what is in the public’s interest. I don’t recollect him ever having blamed the public for its having been deceived. I don’t perceive elitism in him, though I very much perceive it in Chomsky.

Though I consider Lippmann to have been a wise man, I think that he was always trying to find as non-controversial a way of phrasing things as possible, so that he wouldn’t be offending people by his views. Consequently, his writing-style was, in my view, bad. He wanted to understand the world much more than he wanted to convey the world clearly. Some writers use parables to veil their views, but Lippmann used other techniques. Chomsky is different. He’s a bad writer for other reasons. But in one way, he’s a bad writer for the same reason: he veils his views because they’re sometimes the opposite of what he wants the reader to think they are.

To me, Chomsky is a hypocrite, but I don’t perceive Lippmann to have been that, at all. I think that the motivations behind Lippmann’s bad style were different from the motivations behind Chomsky’s bad style.