How do you convey a passion to other people about critical information that you have discovered or uncovered to be more precise? For conversations sake, lets say you spent years researching a topic and found volumes of clear evidence to link hidden truths and ideas that would profoundly change the world if truth is disseminated and accepted. You risk being judged of saying something controversial, yet you feel it is so compelling that you should share this information despite the hesitation.
The web of deceit has infiltrated our media systems that transmit much of what we become aware of in the current information zeitgeist a.k.a. news. Snippets of our current information ignite censorship and filter down in doses that are approved from some editors desk. As others may not be very interested in your findings and you want to share them, you become disenchanted with how others may receive these personal thought gems let alone agree with them.
With all the disinformation, propaganda, and demagogues for our media sources which are acting pundits for the oligarchy, there is so much created information that must be very critically and logically deciphered to get some sort of semblance of truth that others can confirm, such as a litmus test of reason. The trick is to use logic on those who create much of the babble that dissuade their audiences not yet awakened to this manipulation. Most of these snake-oil sales-persons are under a bureaucratic control of some governing body that do not adhere to the fundamental journalistic philosophy this nation was forged on: an independent and unsolicited purveyor in factual origins that transcend the boundaries of moral turpitude.
We must let reason depose judgements of moral turpitude, as it is the only defense we have from the despotic control over our liberties. The rational person can be a juggernaut of resistance to the immoral behavior and malicious intent of the autocratic mind. They are approaching the world with a selfish agenda that can easily be dismantled if we pay attention and diffuse their jargon of lies with reason. The single most important element in any body politic is the education of the human being. An education that supports free thinking, and critical thinking in these times of another very dark age in humanity.
The only salvation we must bolster is a direct result of our ability to intelligently analyze the affairs of our communities, let alone our own personal psyche’s. Whatever paradigm shift happens to befall us, we are directly responsible for its vindication or its indictment. As a people we must work together to fight tyranny because it will take more than just one of us to keep down the unreasonable and chaotic oppression of the few.
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
― Samuel Adams
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
― Adolf Hitler
― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
― James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison
― Thomas Jefferson
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
― Noah Webster
“Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain.
By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
― Aesop, Aesop’s Fables
What a famous person says does not necessarily mean it is true. Does your critical thinking tell you that or not? Does my comment make you angry and so will you now delete my comment?
There is a parable of Asian wisdom that goes something like this…. An honorable man praying near a Buddha is approached by an honorableless man who spits at the Buddha as he approaches. The honorable man simply notices him and says…..”You spit, I pray!”
The moral is that the man who spits at heaven will only have the spittle come down and defile their own person, not that of whom they pray to.
The Buddha was sitting under a tree talking to his disciples when a man came and spat in his face. He wiped it off, and he asked the man, “What next? What do you want to say next?” The man was a little puzzled because he himself never expected that when you spit in someone’s face he should ask “What next?” He had no such experience in his past. He had insulted people and they had become angry and they had reacted. Or if they were cowards and weaklings, they had smiled, trying to bribe him. But the Buddha was like neither, he was not angry, nor in any way offended, nor in any way cowardly. But just matter-of-factly he said, “What next?” There was no reaction on his part.
But Buddha’s disciples became angry, and they reacted. His closest disciple, Ananda, said, “This is too much. We cannot tolerate it. He has to be punished for it, otherwise everybody will start doing things like this!”
Buddha said, “You keep silent. He has not offended me, but you are offending me. He is new, a stranger. He must have heard from people something about me, that this man is an atheist, a dangerous man who is throwing people off their track, a revolutionary, a corrupter. And he may have formed some idea, a notion of me. He has not spit on me, he has spit on his notion. He has spit on his idea of me because he does not know me at all, so how can he spit on me?
“If you think on it deeply,” Buddha said, “he has spit on his own mind. I am not part of it, and I can see that this poor man must have something else to say because this is a way of saying something. Spitting is a way of saying something. There are moments when you feel that language is impotent: in deep love, in intense anger, in hate, in prayer. There are intense moments when language is impotent. Then you have to do something. When you are angry, intensely angry, you hit the person, you spit on him, you are saying something. I can understand him. He must have something more to say, that’s why I’m asking, “What next?”
The man was even more puzzled! And Buddha said to his disciples, “I am more offended by you because you know me, and you have lived for years with me, and still you react.”
Puzzled, confused, the man returned home. He could not sleep the whole night. When you see a Buddha, it is difficult, impossible to sleep anymore the way you used to sleep before. Again and again he was haunted by the experience. He could not explain it to himself, what had happened. He was trembling all over, sweating and soaking the sheets. He had never come across such a man; the Buddha had shattered his whole mind and his whole pattern, his whole past.
The next morning he went back. He threw himself at Buddha’s feet. Buddha asked him again, “What next? This, too, is a way of saying something that cannot be said in language. When you come and touch my feet, you are saying something that cannot be said ordinarily, for which all words are too narrow; it cannot be contained in them.” Buddha said, “Look, Ananda, this man is again here, he is saying something. This man is a man of deep emotions.”
The man looked at Buddha and said, “Forgive me for what I did yesterday.”
Buddha said, “Forgive? But I am not the same man to whom you did it. The Ganges goes on flowing, it is never the same Ganges again. Every man is a river. The man you spit upon is no longer here. I look just like him, but I am not the same, much has happened in these twenty-four hours! The river has flowed so much. So I cannot forgive you because I have no grudge against you.
“And you also are new. I can see you are not the same man who came yesterday because that man was angry and he spit, whereas you are bowing at my feet, touching my feet. How can you be the same man? You are not the same man, so let us forget about it. Those two people, the man who spit and the man on whom he spit, both are no more. Come closer. Let us talk of something else.”