(Header image: Photo by Liane Metzler on Unsplash)
In my last essay at Granite Grok I discussed the accumulation of knowledge as a function of the invention of written language, and how knowledge in many fields became so great that it required the development of careers where people focused on one specific field of study – doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. And I pointed out that in that accumulation of knowledge and the follow-on development of experts in that knowledge was the implicit need to trust in those experts to do right by those who engaged them in their role as experts.
But trust in experts is a double-edged sword. And we have a crisis of trust… specifically, too much trust. Childlike, naive trust.
LOSING AN OLD FRIENDSHIP
Like all marriages I have differences with my wife and I have used a few close friends as sounding boards as I gripe from time to time (I have no doubt she does the same; I can hear her yammering away in Russian to her friends and family and hear my name, or at least the word husband, and know I’m the subject). In doing so I always hope for some nugget of advice that I might use to improve relations. Having had a yuuuuuuge blowup over Jabbing the kids (her for, me against – and they’re not, thankfully, plus we’ve had Covid so I have a reprieve), I was talking with one friend, whom I’ve known for over 30 years and who has been in general on my side of things – he having had his own bitter issues with his now-ex – who said he sided with my wife on this one. He then said “I can’t believe you’re an antivaxer”.
Ouch. He knows full well I’m intelligent and educated and his use of the smear hurt. Note that in general I view vaccines as one of the single greatest advances in medicine – for example, prior to my trip to Asia a few years ago I was a pincushion by the time I left. MMR booster. DTP booster. Typhoid, Hepatitis A & B boosters. I got shots for all sorts of things including Japanese Encephalitis, which apparently is the latest scare in Australia. Anti-vax in general, I’m not… and I was astonished at his inability to differentiate. (I keep trying to find Smallpox vaccine for a booster for me, and for the kids… discussed here as one of the next possible plannedemics. Same for Typhoid but the doctor won’t do it unless we’re booked to travel… may need to make something up. Typhoid is a killer in poor sanitation conditions!)
Without the detailed recitation of the conversation and subsequent text storm back and forth, even as I presented evidence upon evidence upon evidence of the harm The Jab is doing, and multiple estimates of vast underreporting to VAERS, plus offers to share stories and pictures of individuals who have been harmed… his refusal to consider anything I sent and then his response to all this shocked me to the core – paraphrased though he specifically used the word laughable:
The idea that the US government would continue to let these vaccines be given if they were that dangerous is laughable.
This is a man with significantly more life experience – plus lessons in the School of Hard Knocks – than I. I was flabbergasted at this naivete. He reminded me that I’ve been “paranoid” about government since we met when I was still in graduate school… I reminded him about Ruby Ridge and Waco. (And while I didn’t go into things like the Tuskegee Experiment, or Operation Sea Spray, or the internment of Japanese Americans by the Democrats, or myriad other examples of government misdeeds just here in the US, let alone multiple governments around the world behaving badly… this is also important context to my distrust of government. Let alone the Shoah. Let alone over 100 million dead in the quest for Communism/Socialism.)
Similar lectures have come from both my mother’s-generation cousin and my older sister at my refusal to get the Jab despite my talking about documented side effects. Even before the release of nine f*cking pages of side effects, I was paying close attention to VAERS and other information coming out about how dangerous these shots were. Yet both had a starry-eyed, child-like trust in the medical and governmental experts who pronounced, mantra-like, that these were safe and effective even as evidence mounted of immune erosion and the narrative changed from these things giving immunity to merely ameliorating and moderating the symptoms. Both have said “But I’ve gotten them and I’m fine”… except that my sister is in cancer-remission status, and I am dreading what I feel is the inevitable phone call that her cancer is back with a vengeance. (Note: My father-in-law recently passed, his cancer having returned, and while I haven’t asked as the Jab is a sore point between my wife and I, I would bet money he dutifully trusted his government’s pronouncements that they were safe and effective.)
Nor have I heard the term herd immunity connected to these Jabs in quite some time in any sort of discussions. Even now, people smile at me like Eloi when I attempt to warn them (italics in the original replaced by underlining):
…talking with a parent of one of my kids’ classmates at a kid sporting event. Puffing up proudly, he declared that both he and his wife had been fully vaccinated, that their older child had been too, and that as soon as their other kid was 12 they’d get be Jabbed too.
He asked if I was vaccinated, and I said “No”. When he asked why, I said that I had some serious safety concerns about this emergency use authorization stuff including the fact that no mRNA treatment having ever made it through human trials before, and the rush to get this out. I mentioned the Nuremberg code, and said that for a virus that has about a 99.8% recovery rate for people under 70, I was not scared…. His smile became this fixed , eyes unresponsive, just nodding a la OK, whatever, just get away from me you conspiracy monger you.
I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist – and worse.
Needless to say, anything that I would cite in our conversations would not only not spark a reaction of curious inquiry, but would always be casually dismissed as “misinformation” because it didn’t come from the sources they trusted.
Thus is the power of controlling the information flow. Thus is the power of narrowing the Overton Window to only permit the “right” news sources to be believed.
APPROVED SOURCES
I don’t recall which of Bernard Goldberg’s books critical of today’s media it was in, but there was an example where a reporter called into his paper about his as-it-was-happening-eye-witnessing of a fire at some chemical plant overseas – Bhopal? Not sure. – and in giving a report on the fire, the visible damages, the clouds of smoke billowing and doubtless putting people at risk, their editor refused – refused – to take the reporter at his word. “There’s nothing about it on the wires…” So the editor passed up on a chance to break a huge news story ahead of anyone else, from one of his own reporters, because the accepted news sources had nothing on it. The conversation ended with “Oh, wait, it’s on [AP? UPI?] now so we’ll run it”.
I can only imagine the frustration that reporter felt at this. A possible career-making scoop, squelched by a timid editor.
We all need to vet information. Even I, as widely as I read in these writings and my general daily information gathering, do give some places more credence than others. But I’m certainly willing to consider and weigh information even from sources I’ve not fully trusted. The fact that so many are so closed to information flowing from anything but a few “official” trusted sources gives those who control that information flow staggering power.
Image credit © 2022, NITZAKHON aka “Red Pilled Jew” who can be found HERE
- It doesn’t matter what’s true, it’s what you can get people to believe.
- If you control the information flow, you can control what people believe.
- If you can emotionally manipulate a conclusion, it cannot be dislodged by facts, reason, or logic
Yuri Bezmenov was right. (Video, 13:36). From somewhere, don’t recall specifically, You cannot argue rationally with a conclusion arrived at emotionally.
And that’s a critical point. We are not rational beings with emotions, but emotional beings with the capacity to reason. Fear, terror, disgust… emotions tied to immediate survival, are the most powerful of all – as are ones connected to giving the mark information consumer a sense of moral superiority. Not for nothing is fear, specifically, the Mind Killer. Not for nothing do first impressions matter – for interviews or anything else. We make snap decisions based on gut reactions, and then rationalize the search for evidence to support those reactions.
THE BERNIE MADOFF EFFECT
Bernie Madoff was a con man infamous for his Ponzi scheme investments. He played off the trust people gave him as an “expert” who – purportedly – showed great results. But ultimately that trust was betrayed.
People want to believe experts because they don’t have the time, interest, or intellectual capacity to learn the necessary knowledge – a very understandable thing. As I noted in that piece at Granite Grok, as knowledge accumulated thanks to the invention of writing knowledge in specific fields became so great that people made specialization in that field their career. Because we believe these people to be ethical based on overall experiences and societal gestalt and modern societal history, we believe them – a belief, until the last few years, which has more-or-less been viable at least in the medical front (though trust in the enemedia has, IMHO rightly, been slipping for at least a decade). But a modern, high-trust, socially stable society is, in fact, an aberration. Most people have stability privilege and think Oh that’s just not possible! to almost any potentially bad thing that’s discussed. And even when it starts to become clear we have been fooled, whether on a small, large, or life-threatening scale, the vast majority reject it.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Why? Vanity again. And from my time in jail… no, seriously, I taught classes in a jail… the training on how to avoid being conned by inmates made something clear: the smarter, more intelligent, and more educated you are the more easily you can be fooled as a general rule. This was seconded by the inmates themselves in candid slips. (And in one class, showing how data and videos can be misused – they, among all the various students to whom I gave that lecture, were the quickest to pick up on the examples of deception I gave.)
We don’t want to admit we’ve been taken. Like that friend… like my sister and cousin and countless others… the mast majority would rather cling to the illusion that all is well and good rather than admit we’ve been deceived. They’d rather cling to a vision of the world as stable, and people being good, than admit that there is a dark and fetid underworld just below the surface of the serene and calm world in which they think they live. They’d rather not admit that civilization is a very thin crust over the churning caldera of chaos. What was it Heinlein said?
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
They’d rather trust, even when that trust is misplaced and more importantly obviously misplaced. They’d rather trust, even when the claims – like Madoff’s investment results – are utterly “too good to be true”. They’d rather trust, even as the effects of that distrust become evident.
But history is clear – the modern, high trust, and safe society we live in these days is an aberration from human history. For this is an accurate, yet terrifying, realization:
Got preps? And as you go through your day and your week and so on, remember this cautionary alteration of Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring:
“Are you distrustful?… You’re not distrustful enough.”
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And begging Urban Scoop‘s tolerance, please do look at my MONDAY MEMES. Ridicule is a most effective weapon… plus, humor can make an unpalatable message be something a person will accept when they wouldn’t accept the message directly.
