After getting exceedingly paranoid about how long this was getting relative to how much I trust the electrical grid here, I just posted a response at my blog
Thanks for picking this discussion up! I think it is itself important, even if the number of people who actually care about the truth in and of itself are very rare, and it will benefit very few besides. The question of how much benefit people can get out of the truth is very important to understanding why they behave like they do, and what types of governmental structures work for them, I think.
Around 40% of people do not conduct an inner dialogue. Truth as something apart that one has to litigate with oneself may simply make no sense in such cases.
May 11, 2022·edited May 11, 2022Liked by John Carter
(Recently discovered this excellent blog. Though I agree with the fundamental point of the article, I think there may be a way to strengthen the case.)
The Genie of the example (let's call him the Matter Genie) does not exist, for all the reasons stated. Matter is incalculably more resistant than thought, so the fatso does not have access to the kind of instantaneous, transformational power the Matter Genie represents. That doesn't mean the land-whale doesn't *search* for said power; history is larded (hah) with snake-oil salesmen selling tonics and tinctures that claim to hold the key to pain-free transformation, and the grift continues to this day. When buying into such Matter Genie scams, they believe they are essentially outsourcing the pain, which is duly paid for with money. You might even say that certain kinds of surgeons even wield a bit of "real" power in this regard -- even though we know the ersatz "beauty" they produce is nothing like the real thing. But even in the best cases, the pain/cost is not commensurate with the result, and is fleeting if no additional personal effort is made to maintain or improve the transformation. Truth and beauty are inexorably chained to work in the natural world.
This isn't even a secular ideal; religious people throughout the Holocene (and likely before) have long understood this basic principle of reality, in the same way we've understood, long before Newton, that things fall when they are dropped. That's why even those transformations granted by the gods required effort, sacrifice and/or pain. We knelt in dirt, we fasted, we burnt and slaughtered offerings of crops and livestock. In some cases we even offered up our own neighbors, friends and family in payment. Much of this activity was barbaric -- and some of it horribly evil -- but not outright insane; we knew from experience that entropy was real, and that all goods had a cost attached.
The Matter Genie is a fiction, in other words. Not so, the Opinion Genie. These can be found everywhere, on every channel and feed, in every institution from the academy to the advertising industry to the federal government and its mouthpieces. The slothful, gluttonous mind can freely outsource the work of thinking to these creatures, and will find what is spoon-fed back to them to be indistinguishable from truth. More importantly, it feeds them terms and slogans that will act as convenient substitutes for thought. Think of all the (hilariously overt) talk of "messaging failures" that swirls throughout Western media outlets. The notion here being that the Genie has failed to supply its client with the sufficient language to escape critical thought, inconvenient questions, painful realizations. The Genies don't do this because they are evil (they *are*, but that isn't the mechanism at play). It's a market service they are providing to fulfill a demand -- essentially for "free", and even without a complete understanding of their own grift. When the Opinion Fatty lacks sustenance, he is like a starving child in the woods. He's likely to feel ashamed, alone and afraid in any setting (and particularly if he is a man, who's measure of worth is strongly linked to his ability to briefly summarize reality). And unlike those elixirs the Matter Genie provides, the Opinion Genie's results are unfalsifiable by evidence, and, like a funhouse mirror of logic, subsequent rationales can always be provided to make the false image appear true.
monde”.* The lie plays a tremendous role in human life. The world is swallowed up in lies. And to the problem of the lie philosophers have paid too little attention. Not only do people that are by nature liarslie, but also uprightly truthful people. They lie not only consciously, but also without awareness. Peoplelive in fear, and the lie is a weapon of defense. The structure of consciousness is deformed by the function of lie, begotten by fear. There exist several types of lies, but the most interesting is that type of lie, which is conceived of not as a sin or a vice, but as a duty. Elementary in type is the greedy lie, as the means for the attainment of egoistical aims. But there is a type of lie, non-greedy, almost artistic, when man does not make a distinction between reality and his own fictitious inventions. This type likewise does not here interest me. There is moreover a type of lie out of sympathy, which can be to thesaving of the life of another man. Uprightness does not signify formalism and pedanticism. The moral act of man is always creatively-individual and is worked for the concrete instances of life, singular and irrepeatable. But most significant is the social lie, affirmed of as a duty. The life of states and societies is full of it, it serves as a support for civilisation, this gives it pride, as being the vanguard against chaosand anarchy. https://www.scribd.com/document/193027766/The-Paradox-of-the-Lie-Berdyaev
May 26, 2022·edited May 26, 2022Liked by John Carter
I see it as a four dimensional issue: loyalty, truthfulness, stoicism and empathy. Dissidents tend to be high in truthfulness and stoicism. Victims, ''useful idiots'' and the vast majority of people have higher loyalty. Cynics, have low loyalty and low stoicism, they are aware of the grift but they don't care to go deep on the issue, it's just not worth it for them, they rapidly sense the ''power field'' and move along. Grifters, frivolous people, psychos, those are generally low in all four dimensions.
To be fair, losing weight doesn't necessarily mean you have to starve or exercise a whole lot. Plenty of people have managed by using, for example, a low-carb approach. One problem with that, of course, is that the mainstream doesn't generally approve of that sort of diet. Not to mention it does involve other sorts of pain — learning not to eat toxic amounts of sugar, for example, or snacking constantly, or, heaven forbid, giving up bread and pasta.
It's largely a matter of motivation, as you pointed out with your blister story in Truth Hurts.
One other minor point is that losing weight and getting fit is not just to become attractive. It's also a lot healthier and your brain works better.
“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”
After getting exceedingly paranoid about how long this was getting relative to how much I trust the electrical grid here, I just posted a response at my blog
https://dochammer.substack.com/p/response-to-john-carters-reponse
Thanks for picking this discussion up! I think it is itself important, even if the number of people who actually care about the truth in and of itself are very rare, and it will benefit very few besides. The question of how much benefit people can get out of the truth is very important to understanding why they behave like they do, and what types of governmental structures work for them, I think.
Around 40% of people do not conduct an inner dialogue. Truth as something apart that one has to litigate with oneself may simply make no sense in such cases.
(Recently discovered this excellent blog. Though I agree with the fundamental point of the article, I think there may be a way to strengthen the case.)
The Genie of the example (let's call him the Matter Genie) does not exist, for all the reasons stated. Matter is incalculably more resistant than thought, so the fatso does not have access to the kind of instantaneous, transformational power the Matter Genie represents. That doesn't mean the land-whale doesn't *search* for said power; history is larded (hah) with snake-oil salesmen selling tonics and tinctures that claim to hold the key to pain-free transformation, and the grift continues to this day. When buying into such Matter Genie scams, they believe they are essentially outsourcing the pain, which is duly paid for with money. You might even say that certain kinds of surgeons even wield a bit of "real" power in this regard -- even though we know the ersatz "beauty" they produce is nothing like the real thing. But even in the best cases, the pain/cost is not commensurate with the result, and is fleeting if no additional personal effort is made to maintain or improve the transformation. Truth and beauty are inexorably chained to work in the natural world.
This isn't even a secular ideal; religious people throughout the Holocene (and likely before) have long understood this basic principle of reality, in the same way we've understood, long before Newton, that things fall when they are dropped. That's why even those transformations granted by the gods required effort, sacrifice and/or pain. We knelt in dirt, we fasted, we burnt and slaughtered offerings of crops and livestock. In some cases we even offered up our own neighbors, friends and family in payment. Much of this activity was barbaric -- and some of it horribly evil -- but not outright insane; we knew from experience that entropy was real, and that all goods had a cost attached.
The Matter Genie is a fiction, in other words. Not so, the Opinion Genie. These can be found everywhere, on every channel and feed, in every institution from the academy to the advertising industry to the federal government and its mouthpieces. The slothful, gluttonous mind can freely outsource the work of thinking to these creatures, and will find what is spoon-fed back to them to be indistinguishable from truth. More importantly, it feeds them terms and slogans that will act as convenient substitutes for thought. Think of all the (hilariously overt) talk of "messaging failures" that swirls throughout Western media outlets. The notion here being that the Genie has failed to supply its client with the sufficient language to escape critical thought, inconvenient questions, painful realizations. The Genies don't do this because they are evil (they *are*, but that isn't the mechanism at play). It's a market service they are providing to fulfill a demand -- essentially for "free", and even without a complete understanding of their own grift. When the Opinion Fatty lacks sustenance, he is like a starving child in the woods. He's likely to feel ashamed, alone and afraid in any setting (and particularly if he is a man, who's measure of worth is strongly linked to his ability to briefly summarize reality). And unlike those elixirs the Matter Genie provides, the Opinion Genie's results are unfalsifiable by evidence, and, like a funhouse mirror of logic, subsequent rationales can always be provided to make the false image appear true.
What a brilliant post.
monde”.* The lie plays a tremendous role in human life. The world is swallowed up in lies. And to the problem of the lie philosophers have paid too little attention. Not only do people that are by nature liarslie, but also uprightly truthful people. They lie not only consciously, but also without awareness. Peoplelive in fear, and the lie is a weapon of defense. The structure of consciousness is deformed by the function of lie, begotten by fear. There exist several types of lies, but the most interesting is that type of lie, which is conceived of not as a sin or a vice, but as a duty. Elementary in type is the greedy lie, as the means for the attainment of egoistical aims. But there is a type of lie, non-greedy, almost artistic, when man does not make a distinction between reality and his own fictitious inventions. This type likewise does not here interest me. There is moreover a type of lie out of sympathy, which can be to thesaving of the life of another man. Uprightness does not signify formalism and pedanticism. The moral act of man is always creatively-individual and is worked for the concrete instances of life, singular and irrepeatable. But most significant is the social lie, affirmed of as a duty. The life of states and societies is full of it, it serves as a support for civilisation, this gives it pride, as being the vanguard against chaosand anarchy. https://www.scribd.com/document/193027766/The-Paradox-of-the-Lie-Berdyaev
I see it as a four dimensional issue: loyalty, truthfulness, stoicism and empathy. Dissidents tend to be high in truthfulness and stoicism. Victims, ''useful idiots'' and the vast majority of people have higher loyalty. Cynics, have low loyalty and low stoicism, they are aware of the grift but they don't care to go deep on the issue, it's just not worth it for them, they rapidly sense the ''power field'' and move along. Grifters, frivolous people, psychos, those are generally low in all four dimensions.
No wonder they pretend to be someone else on the internet!
Because they can, painlessly.
To be fair, losing weight doesn't necessarily mean you have to starve or exercise a whole lot. Plenty of people have managed by using, for example, a low-carb approach. One problem with that, of course, is that the mainstream doesn't generally approve of that sort of diet. Not to mention it does involve other sorts of pain — learning not to eat toxic amounts of sugar, for example, or snacking constantly, or, heaven forbid, giving up bread and pasta.
It's largely a matter of motivation, as you pointed out with your blister story in Truth Hurts.
One other minor point is that losing weight and getting fit is not just to become attractive. It's also a lot healthier and your brain works better.
If it can happen it will happen. Close down the grocery stores and lets find out what happens. Even the skinny people will freak out.
https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/
“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”