- Godwin Cotter
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth, and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice. Jesus before Pilate (John 18:37)
Knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we modems are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding...
The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.
Mortimer Adler's wrote that in 1972 ( How to Read a Book, page 4)
One recalls experiments where a caged rat will forget to eat, drink or sleep if it is able to trigger a dopamine hit by tapping a lever of some sort. What Adler was observing in the 1970's is on hyperdrive today. Our devices deliver us our dopamine hits often via algorithm curated newsfeeds and social media. If another cage resident presents a differing point of view, we react violently. Surely the other is a hater or a scammer. "Do not break my bubble, you monster." And when I turn my eyes away from a screen and look around me at friends or family all staring at their screens, it does seem like we are all locked on our own personalized dopamine releasing mechanisms. For some, it may be gossip, sports or video games but for myself it is news for I am a news-junkie. It's good to know what is going on in the world, right?
We have a vague awareness that we are being manipulated by external forces but are at the same time we are too willing to be manipulated. In the World Wars, we gave our governments a pass on applying strict censorship of the news for the sake of the war effort and to keep up morale etc., etc. Truth is the first casualty in war. But all forms of government censorship were lifted as atomic bombs fell on two Japanese cities and the war ended, right? Perhaps, or maybe we just replaced a crude and unwieldy war-time censorship with a more sophisticated and scalable peace-time manipulation of the news. It is surprising how quickly all mainstream media and their government allies start singing from the same songbook. The old songbook is scrubbed of uncomfortable truths and in resulting empty space, a chorus of fashionable fictions is inserted.
Different times have different reverential choruses and jingles. In the early 1930's, only the stupid, backward, cynical morons or those blinded by religion would deny the benevolent rule of Joseph Stalin. Communism was going to usher in a worker's paradise! During Stalin's forced famine in the Ukraine, Western audiences were served up a steady diet of Holodomor denialism. Truth was carpet bombed by the testimonies of Watler Duranty, (devil worshipper, New York Times star reporter, winner of the Pulitzer prize) along with prominent writers such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw as well as the former French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot. And the list goes on.
The loudest voices in the news-cycle always side-stepped the truth and voiced the approved narrative of the Epstein class of their day. I remember when Iraq possessed WMD's (weapons of mass destruction) that could be deployed within 45 minutes. To question the testimony of British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, or that of George Bush or General Colin Powell was either grossly stupid or incredibly evil. It is still somewhat verboten to believe that the covid-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology: the official explanation is still that it arose spontaneously through a process of natural viral mutation in a Wuhan wet market. There is absolutely nothing remotely credible about the Pizzagate fiasco. The nine hundred references to pizza (often linked with grape soda) found in the Epstein files is just evidence that the super-rich appreciate foods that you might want to serve at a birthday party for your five-year-old. Let us remember that there are at least 72 genders, perhaps as many at 200, most of which can compete without any unfair competitive advantage in women's sports.
Those with their hands on the levers of power in both the media and government have carpet bombed any reports of the human cost of Netanyahu's policies and operations in the Gaza Strip, West Bank or the annexed region of Southern Lebanon. The flotilla carry much needed food and medicine to the Gaza strip and been made out into a terrorist initiative. But to itemize the misinformation and disinformation we are being fed, would be like counting gains of sand on the sea shore. And how do we know, the things we are sure of aren't merely the product of us living in one of the many media bubbles online humanity has been divided into? Can truth be pursued with taps of a fingertip, in the exact same manner we conduct our love affair with brain rot? Will we simply end up in warring camps, similar to the situation in George Orwell's 1984? In his book, humanity is divided into Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia and the competing power blocks are locked into perpetual war. Out of that pressure cooker, the peons learn to think in such slogans as WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
In 2nd Thessalonians 2:10-11, St. Paul warns that the people of the future will be given "a strong delusion" because "they refused to love the truth" and "took pleasure in unrighteousness". So, according to scripture, how do we get out of the matrix? We have to love the truth, listen to God's voice, repent of our unrighteousness. Jesus is our red pill. The rest is chatter, one bubble talking against the next bubble, and both with their own narrative blind spots and errors.
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