Zahir
Ebrahim | Project
Humanbeingsfirst.org
First version
December 18, 2016 | Final version January 21, 2017
First,
what epistemology means in the modern English language dictionary:
Epistemology:
Noun
1.
the theory of knowledge, esp the critical study of its validity,
methods, and scope
2.
a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods,
and limits of human knowledge.
Word
Origin: from Greek epistēmē knowledge
In
effect, epistemology means how we know what we know.
That's
obviously an important matter.
Because
what we think we know, or believe to be true, may be false, or
half-truth, three-quarter truth, or even a big lie wrapped in
plausible sounding statements that are vicariously believed to be
true (through popular literature, movies, newsmedia, appeal to
celebrities and authority figures, cultural beliefs, myths, pseudo
science, and hubris such as ingrained superiority complex and
exceptionalism, and its converse, inferiority complex and learned
helplessness).
Our
thinking and our beliefs, just like our subconscious fears and
anxieties, largely determine our behavior. And those who can control
our beliefs and our thinking, or can exercise our fears and
anxieties, can control our behavior. Therefore, understanding the
epistemology of every domain of human endeavor, from the hard
sciences to the social sciences, and from politics to religion, is
not only an important matter, but also a fundamental matter for
getting to understand reality the way it actually is. This is equally
important for the arts and humanities, because art often imitates
life and becomes the expression of the vicariously held belief
system. It naturally leads to life imitating art, and the two
reinforce each other in a self-fulfilling prophecy to form the larger
cultural belief system.
So
let's examine some of the problems encountered in epistemology. We
begin with those that are fundamental to human beings that hinder the
understanding of reality, and make our way towards those that are
fundamental to reality itself.
Here
is the fundamental problem. It was first described by this author in
his attempt to get an objective handle on epistemology of belief
systems in his case study: Why is the Holy Qur'an so easy to
hijack? Part-III.
Begin
Excerpt
Incestuous
self-reinforcement is the bane of objective scholarship. This is why
the scientific process came into existence to study any matter
objectively. Putting the data and its analysis before others to
scrutinize and adjudicate, enables defeating all forms of crippled
epistemology and ingrained bias which are often a consequence of
incestuous self-reinforcement. One has the opportunity to
examine the same data, and examine the analysis performed on that
data, conduct one's own experiments so to speak, and either
substantiate or refute the thesis and conclusions so reached. This
process, when honestly followed, itself advances not just the state
of understanding, but enables new discoveries.
But
the scientific process itself, carried out by human beings, is also
beholden to the limitations of the human being in his subconscious
ability to be perfectly objective on any matter. This means all the
natural forces of bias that the human mind is unconsciously
susceptible to that work their magic to co-opt the rational mind from
seeing matters, reality, existence, the way it actually is, have to
be overcome to ensure objectivity at the cognitive level and accuracy
in the pursuit of understanding by the scientific method. A faulty
method in implementation, or its deliberate corruption due to vested
interests, will only lead to faulty results and false conclusions in
the name of science and objectivity.
This
is all the more crucial in social sciences where subjectivity is
inherent and inescapable – the species is studying itself. And
also because the social sciences can be diabolically harnessed to
Machiavellianly foist unpopular political agendas on the public mind
disguised as science, or, by appeal to suitably co-opted scientific
authority, peddle propaganda and “religion” as science
(see “Disambiguating Religion, Science and Psychological
Warfare Operations”,
http://tinyurl.com/Human-Limits-Scientific-Method). There are many
examples that illustrate the truth of this statement that span the
gamut of engineering unpopular public policy, from the eugenics
movement in the early twentieth century to limit immigration to
selected races to global warming in the early twenty-first to usher
in carbon credit for limiting growth. All based on appeal to pseudo
science and deployed with the full force of perception management of
the public mind!
Religion
is the same way.
The
forces of subconscious bias infecting the human mind include (the
following breakdown is adapted from the more detailed examination of
the forces of co-option in “The Art and Science of Co-option”,
http://tinyurl.com/art-and-science-of-co-option):
(1)
socialization bias
(nurture, social programming, learning) ;
(2)
perception bias (nature,
hardware, DNA, limits imposed by the five perception senses and the
brain capacity, natural inclination and natural talent, propensity,
hardwired intellectual capacity to think and reflect, IQ
(Intelligence Quotient), hardwired psychological bent of mind, EQ
(Emotional Quotient), hardwired spiritual capacity to transcend
materialism, proclivity toward transcendentalism, awareness,
consciousness, animism, animatism, superstition, etc., SQ
(Spiritual Quotient) ;
(3)
data availability bias
(what data is used, what books and papers one reads for instance; and
its corollary data assimilability bias,
how much data one can assimilate, absorb) ;
(4)
confirmation bias (how
data is used to preselect a desired outcome, narrowing the scope of
data, massaging the data to confirm an a priori conclusion or belief)
;
(5)
presuppositional bias
(culturally ingrained presumptions or prejudices or affinities, loves
and hates, that transcend the individual and are rooted in the value
system of the civilization one grows up in, such as: Orientalism
– looking down upon the East, uber alles, master race,
exceptionalism, superiority complex; and its opposites: inferiority
complex, house niggers, Uncle Toms, Occidentosis
– East looking to the West or to the white man for solutions
thinking it superior; Triumphalism
– aspiring to universalize one's own values and beliefs
thinking all others inferior, such as: Capitalism, Communism,
Democracy, Christianity, Islam, la mission civilisatrice, the
white man's burden, Secular Humanism, Scientific Materialism, Dogmas
of Science and Medicine that limit their scope unnaturally,
etceteras).
All
these factors underwriting incestuous self-reinforcement (reinforcing
what is already believed whether consciously or instinctively),
create an inescapable mind-lock from which cognitively escaping to
objectivity and impartiality remains elusive for most people. These
largely un quantifiable factors contribute to the formulation of
one's worldview and instinctualize the subjectivity in
perspective that man is irreparably plagued with for his fundamental
loves, hates, beliefs, and sense of attachment that may span the
gamut from tribal to civilizational. This subjectivity is hard to
transcend as it colors the cognitive mind ab initio, subliminally,
subconsciously, and overcoming it is akin to performing brain-surgery
upon one's own brain. A self-referential problem that requires a
great deal of wherewithal to get a handle on and to attempt to rise
to some level of objectivity by creating distance from self.
End
Excerpt
Upon
the heels of incestuous self-reinforcement follows the problem
of co-option. How respectable scientists, scholars, engineers,
doctors, professional authority figures, get co-opted is necessary to
comprehend before one can even commence to understand reality.
Because these experts are the ones who bring the understanding of
reality to the public, when they work off of crippled epistemology,
both wittingly and unwittingly, what the public is led to believe is
often far from the truth of reality. Some pied pipers are just
unwittingly deluded for the lack of sufficient wherewithal in keeping
with the times. They often become useful idiots. But many pied pipers
are deliberate mercenaries. Science and religion are not abstract
processes. These are carried out by human beings, and therefore, are
beholden to their mental life, to their integrity, to their courage,
and to their self-interests. The truth of this statement is beyond
doubt. It is self evident. It is a fallacy and make-belief to believe
that epistemology is free of these human considerations. The
following pertinent passages are from this author's essay: The Art
and Science of Co-option.
Begin
Excerpt
Characteristics
of Co-option
There
are primarily four salient characteristics of co-option. What I
examine below is what I have learnt the hard way. I have encountered
every one of these different forces at one time or another and have
continually been presented with the choice of to confront or be
co-opted. This categorization is not mere academic theorizing. But it
can surely withstand the pedantic rigor of experimental social
psychology. The truth of what follows is beyond doubt. It is
self-evident.
(1)
Self-interest purchased with silence
Many
normal people show great empathy for fellow man, are noble, generous,
chivalrous, charitable, spend of their earnings on social welfare
causes, rush to give aid in disaster situations, and for their own
selves want to know the truth and be truthful, all great motherhood
and apple pie stuff which show the majority of mankind in its best
light. But there is also a darker side to human beings. No I am not
referring to those sociopaths and psychopaths who make wars and
orchestrate the killing fields and commit other evil. This essay is
not about actually committing evil. It is about refraining from
stopping it, and how that in-action comes about given that normal
human beings display all the lovely positive characteristics captured
in the first sentence above.
Under
specific circumstances, most human beings, in fact the same ones who
display all the lovely set of characteristics that shows mankind off
in its best light, tend to lose their quality of humanity, their
quality of mercy, and strangely, their loss of dignity and
self-respect is heralded as “success” in the public eye
under the modern wisdom which relies on expediency and relativity
rather than morality and absolutes in defining social and personal
values.
A
situation that is quite commonplace and anyone can observe it if they
have eyes to see, just as I have observed it time and again and now
it is the first item on my list to convey in What have I learnt as a
student of truth, is that virtually no one gives a farthing's worth
of damn for anyone or anything when giving that damn intersects with
their stomach, career, winning accolades, opportunities to profit,
and to advance in life, business, and profession. People, valiant
people, and people of great conscience and moral gravitas, remain
beholden to those existential matters to their very end. This leads
to an incessant need for rationalizations to mitigate cognitive
dissonance, often buried deep in the subconscious, which span the
gamut of self-deception, from denial of reality to self-justification
to reinterpretation of moral values to legitimize one's own
inclinations, life's choices, and above all, one's silence and
acquiescence before falsehoods, deception, tyranny. People,
irrespective of their brilliance or station in life, will slog away
for a lifetime in voluntary servitude when matters pertain to these
existential needs.
While
for those born on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, the wretched
of the earth, just getting three honest meals a day remains an
endless struggle even in the twenty-first century, for those born on
the right side of the railroad tracks, the lucky of history, there is
evidently no limit to fulfilling these needs either. It's a
bottomless pit. There is always the next milestone to strive for on
the ladder of “success”. Working for tyrants, dictators,
kings, feudal lords, corrupt bastards, dystopic systems, evil empire,
is all okay so long as one is able to pursue that ladder of “success”
honestly and with due diligence. The more outstanding ones take great
pride in accepting titles and honors from those who have killed in
large numbers under the sound of trumpet. This striving is heralded
as being “practical”, “wise”, with “clean
hands”. A majority of good people in the world who exhibit
those fine moral qualities captured in the lovely set of upstanding
human characteristics are in this category. They purchase their slice
of the existential pie with their silence, and with hear no evil,
speak no evil, see no evil. Examples of these rationalizations for
selfishly pursuing one's own self-interests abound and I will spare
the reader my sampling of anecdotal cases to encourage their own
hammering out on the anvil of the following famous Chinese depiction
of the three wise monkeys, their own examples:
Caption
The three wise monkeys: hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil
(2)
Perspective-pollution
In
the limited cases when one finds oneself endeavoring to rise beyond
these pecuniary and existential matters of self-interest and wise
monkeys, one encounters intellectual warfare which is akin to a
gang-rape of the sensible mind. That has been the principal topic of
this book, and as the intelligent reader must have come to realize,
my version of Orwell's statement trumps the novelist's easily: “In
an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary
act.” In my version, in the age of universal deceit, to ferret
out the whole truth about any matter is the bigger revolutionary act.
In the course of this revolutionary act is where many a valiant
intellectual, scholar, activist, and would be revolutionary, all fall
for the want of perspective on primacy. These ardent harbingers of
change, often moved by an inner moral compass to overcome their own
“banality of evil” rather than by any desire for
pecuniary gain, but too naïve to understand primacy and how it
relates to the controlling powers behind the scenes making the public
mind, are easily harvested as useful idiots and patsy-fodder by
crafty perception managers who capture all these zealots in one trap
or another by catering to all possible inclinations of this group
(see my Report on the Mighty Wurlitzer,
http://tinyurl.com/mightywurlitzer ).
Overcoming
this externally induced perspective deficiency however, while
essential, isn't sufficient. For, in the limit, one is plagued by an
even more fundamental subversion which ab initio makes this
externally induced perspective deficiency even possible: incestuous
self-reinforcement through one's own mind. The base elements of this
internal subversion which is the first cause of any crippled
epistemology, and the sine qua non for the harvest of useful idiots,
are [enumerated above in Problem of Incestuous Self-reinforcement.]
[Incestuous
self-reinforcement is a pernicious] self-referential problem that
requires a great deal of wherewithal to get a handle on, and to
attempt to rise to some level of objectivity by creating distance
from self. One of the ways to do that, as my former professor at
M.I.T., Noam Chomsky, used to say, is to move to Mars and look back
to study the Earthlings. Meaning, to try to look at man and his
beliefs, including one's own, with some degree of emotional and
intellectual detachment as if studying another species.
According
to Bertrand Russell:
“What a
man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index to his
desires – desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If
a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will
scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he
will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered
something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his
instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.”
This
ingrained, almost instinctual, proclivity towards socialized
perspectives plays hand-in-glove with the gang-rape of the mind by
perception managers who exploit that knowledge expertly for mass
behavior control.
The
new potent warfare on the public mind is psychological warfare, and
it relies on distorting the perspective by digging deep into the
human psyche to ultimately control the public behavior for the narrow
interests of the few. An obvious example of this mind manipulation is
the uncanny success of advertising and marketing, a multi-trillion
dollar industry worldwide. A more uncomfortable example is the Mighty
Wurlitzer making the public mind to “United We Stand”
with the objectives of power. Nationalism, patriotism, militarism,
religionism, are the more “acceptable” examples of this
psychological persuasion to which the benign label of
“indoctrination” is often ascribed. Soldiers killing
under the sound of trumpet and returned nobly wrapped in the flag is
its worst “acceptable” form. The extreme example is the
manufacture of suicide bombers, the Manchurian candidates who
are made to believe in their terminal mission by their intelligence
handlers. Except for the latter which may rely on coercively breaking
down the human being completely (physically, psychologically,
spiritually) by inducing personality disorders in order to rebuild
the soldier as a killing machine devoid of all empathy, and thus
without a measure of their own consent, all other forms of behavior
control fundamentally rely on co-opting the commonsense, humanity,
compassion, and mercy of man by perspective distortion.
Perspective
pollution, like an innocent child not being able to comprehend the
reality of feline primacy, precludes understanding of reality the way
reality actually is. And like the futility of a child being explained
by an adult why the cat desires the beautiful but helpless fish, or
why a lion tears apart the lovely wooly sheep, educating the
un-awakened mind on perspective pollution can be just as futile.
Perspective pollution always favors the superior predator, both in
Darwinianism, and in the social Darwinian world order.
Caption
Perspective pollution, like an innocent child not being able to
comprehend the reality of feline primacy, precludes understanding of
reality the way reality actually is. (Image courtesy Desiree L.
Rover)
[...
In summary,] all these four co-options added together:
(1)
Self-interest (selfishness, apathy, cowardice, Faustian
bargains);
(2)
Perspective-pollution (ignorance of truth, distorted
beliefs, leading to becoming patsy-fodder);
(3)
Self-policing to pass the censors of power
(accommodation to power to tell only half-truth, lying by omission);
(4)
Self-policing for the want of efficacy in telling the
whole truth (a public more willing to just kill the messenger);
I
have learnt are formidable Himalayan mountains in the way of
flatlanders learning the whole truth about important matters so that
they and their nations can wage an effective battle for their own
survival against man's greatest predator, the superman.
This
super predator, more intelligent and more privileged than others,
feels driven to rule others because of his advantage, deems himself
beyond good and evil, and like Nietzsche's superman, beyond
the conventional bounds of morality, beyond the calculus of right and
wrong in the name of its higher ideals, whatever the higher causes
that may spring from such higher ideals be: increasing profits,
raising intelligence, subverting beliefs, harnessing religion,
nationalism, patriotism, militarism for world domination, world
government, and beyond. Its principal morality only one: Will to
Power. Its calculus only one: Primacy. Its modus operandi only one:
Deceit. The mind of ordinary man simply remains unable to grasp the
mind of this super predator whose morality of “will to power”
confers to it the “moral obligation” for engaging in any
means necessary for achieving its “noble objectives”.
Mass behavior control is only as difficult for it as the cat playing
with a cornered mouse. Consequently, the superman and its
diabolically ingenious systems of social control continue to keep
mankind in chains by way of deception.
Here
is an example from the eighteenth century of how the primacy instinct
of the superman works without leaving even a hint of its
existence in the common man. According to Bernard de Mandeville's
“Fable of the Bees” for generating the wealth of nations:
“The
economic well-being of the nation depends on the presence of a large
number of men who are content to labor hard all day long. Because men
are naturally lazy they will not work unless forced by necessity to
do so.”
These
are no longer the physical chains as in antiquity past to make men
work hard all day long. Goethe accurately captured the far more
unbreakable chains of slavery:
“None are
more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are
free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by
masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till
wrong looks like right in their eyes.”
Now
they will happily slave away for their masters in voluntary
servitude. Indeed, even come to love their servitude.
I
have learnt that the mind control is so pervasive today that even if
some intelligent people, say friends, are polite enough to hear the
revolutionary out, they cannot relate to what he has to say. The
revolutionary often brings a truth so jarring to the public mind that
Plato understood its implication in the golden era of the Hellenic
civilization that had forced Socrates to drink poison for being a
revolutionary for truth. The handful of open-minds one might reach in
the course of one's revolutionary stint before one succumbs to the
predictable inevitability, are themselves plagued by the same
co-options one overcame to get this far to bring truth to these
people in the hope that they might do something with it. The end
result is making no measurable impact in one's own lifetime in
getting people to understand the truth, never mind to act upon it
with moral courage, let alone when the calling is to put
self-interest aside for a greater interest, the common cause.
I
have learnt that people strive to be moral and upright so long as it
does not cost them anything substantial; specifically, so long as it
does not cost them the sacrificing of any significant self-interest.
Minor sacrifices are palatable so long as it does not make a major
dent in the scheme of things they have laid out for themselves. It is
much wiser to wear the garb of morality and pretend to be virtuous by
obsessing with personal piety, prayers, rituals, liturgies; or,
alternately, just focussing on one's profession and career in the
name of “practicality”, “self-actualization”,
“vision”, disdain for hypocrisy; even focussing on
harmless charity and social welfare causes like the cosmopolitan
Muslim leader Aga Khan, the Muslim humanitarian [late] Abdul Sattar
Edhi of Pakistan, etc., do --- none ever challenge the villainy of
power, all are in fact heralded and celebrated by power, are seen to
mingle with it and accept awards from it for their self-policed
silence, for their dedication to welfare, and all echo the exact same
narratives, axioms, and presuppositions of power.
End
Excerpt
We
can now better understand how authority figures are formed in the
service of power and how they can foster crippled epistemology in
their respective fields by way of adopting silence, half-truths,
three-quarter truths, and outright lies. These authority figures span
the gamut of human life, from podiums to pulpits, leaving no field of
human endeavor impervious to forces of co-option. It is naïve to
think otherwise. And dangerous too, for the public mind, which is
taught from childhood and throughout its educational life and into
its adult station, to trust authority figures as gods. Crippled
epistemology is the primary vehicle of control of the public mind,
and consequently, also its behavior. Ergo, it follows that
un-crippling crippled epistemology is also the primary vehicle for
liberating the public mind from false beliefs, and consequently, its
hidden manipulation for extracting the desired behavior.
“History
is bunk, Says Henry Ford”, reported the New York Times on Oct
28, 1921. What did Ford mean? Ford was quoted saying: “There is
nothing wrong with industry, education, religion or politics, if
one's eyes are open to truth, which is that life is really as simple
as a Ford car.” The New York Times sub headlined that story
with Ford's own statement: “Learn to Read and Write, Then Work
Out Your Own Ideas, Mix With People, Get Experience.” A few
years earlier Ford had also said, “History is Myth”, as
was reported in the New York Times of May 15, 1916. And Ford is also
quoted as having said: “History is more or less bunk. It's
tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present,
and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history
that we make today.” (attribution is to the Chicago Tribune of
25 May 1916).
So
why is history bunk? History obviously informs culture, civilization,
religion, shared memories, shared ethos... and all that which make
human life vibrant and different from each other – because
every people have different histories of how they got to where they
are.
So
let's disambiguate the word history.
It
is both a verb and a noun. As a verb, it is the actual process of the
passage of time and the causality that transpires within it. We are
not concerned here with that notion of history. We are more concerned
with history as a noun. That entails what is recorded in history
books after the fact, and what is believed of the past whether
written down or in oral tradition, as past memories. These memories
inform us vicariously and underwrite our belief systems which in turn
determine our behavior.
The
question is: How much of it is actually true?
This
is important especially where religion is concerned. Virtually all
modern day religions are based on historical memories (except the new
religion of the new world order called Secular Humanism). Moses lived
over 3000 years ago when be brought the Ten Commandments. Jesus lived
2000 years ago when he bequeathed his Gospel to his disciples.
Prophet Muhammad lived 1400 years ago when he brought the Holy Qur'an
to the people. That's only the Abrahamic religions, all God centered.
For the Hindus, a polytheistic but also
root godhead centric religion, Lord Krishna et. al. lived over 5000
years ago and the Vedas et. al. contain oral memories of what these
gods taught (eventually written down no one knows exactly when or by
whom). Like the Holy Qur'an, the Hindu texts have also been memorized
by ardent fellows of the religion from generation to generation and
passed down pretty much intact. These texts and oral traditions
divine the religion for their respective followers as
incontrovertible belief systems. But more significantly, for the
Abrahamic religions specifically, recorded history (in our context as
a noun) is commingled with their respective principal sacred text
attributed directly to their respective harbinger, to create
something larger than the principal sacred text.
Thus
the Jews have their plurality of sacred Talmuds – voluminous
works of their toiling Rabbis as they were forced to migrate from
place to place for over 3000 years. The Christians have their sacred
Old and New Testaments – the authorship of the former being
unknown and the latter being the work of Jesus' disciples, but in the
case of Paul (formerly Saul) who defined what has become known as
Pauline Christianity, the good fellow had never even met Jesus.
Muslims have their own sacred oral narrations called hadiths, and
schools of jurisprudence which have come to largely define what Islam
means to Muslims. But none of it was penned during the lifetime of
Prophet Muhammad, and compiled and written down centuries later. None
of it is contained in the principal text of Islam, the Holy Qur'an.
Yet these secondary sacred texts written by human minds are used to
interpret what is deemed by Muslims to be Divine Revelation, the Holy
Qur'an, and which ends up defining what Islam means as opposed to the
principal text defining it. This author examined this bizarre paradox
in the case study: Why is the Holy Qur'an so easy to hijack?
Part-IV, from which the following epistemological problem of
figuring out what is true in history and what is myth is excerpted.
Begin
Excerpt
Here
is the fundamental problem. It was first described by this author in
his deconstruction of the Zionist conquest of Palestine, in the
pamphlet: How to Return to Palestine.
Begin
Excerpt [palestine]
As
a practicing engineer – used to examining complex systems in
order to build them – turned social scientist, puzzled by this
bizarre empiricism of the slaughter of the goy in massive numbers and
the systematic destruction of their power-base, with the Jews
successively coming out on top after each slaughter-cycle in such a
short span, I decided to probe deeper. This paper is the result of my
progressively refined research into this question since that very day
of infamy, September 11, 2001. Since the day when I had decided to
dump all a priori pre-suppositions, and all pied-pipers, and had
curled up with William Shirer's Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, and
Hitler's Mein Kampf, to attempt to comprehend the Nazi's
self-inflicted Operation Canned Goods as a pretext for their
war of German Lebensraum. I have, by now, studied countless
historical narratives to understand current affairs and empirical
matters always cloaked in deception. My comprehension today is
layered upon facts uncovered by many a rational, un-afraid detective
who has tread this path before me.
But
it is not mere facts which create perspectives. Although, no doubt,
facts must be built upon in order to be empirical in one's analysis.
In an age when:
–– “deception
is the state of mind and the mind of state”;
–– when
power decides what is fact and what is recorded as fact in its
primary documentation and in the popular Press, which in turn are
subsequently used by others down the chain of narrators echoing what
was by fiat deemed to be fact, as absolute fact, without being
cognizant of that very fact of fiat;
–– when
the enactment of puppetshows is construed as displaying “facts”,
and recorded as such by historians;
facts
by themselves are meaningless in such a landscape when “waging
war by way of deception” upon the public is the norm rather
than the exception.
So,
for instance, is it a fact that '19 Muslim Jihadis' rammed hijacked
airplanes into two tall buildings bringing both of them down into
their own footprint (watch wtc1, wtc2), bringing a third tall
building down into its own footprint a few hours later without even
hitting it (watch wtc7)? In this example, the scientific observation
that three very tall buildings comprising millions of tons of steel
exploded into powder and/or collapsed into their own footprint at
near free-fall speed, is an unarguable empirical fact. And the only
fact. The rest, who dunnit, how it was done, and why it was done, as
officially recorded in the current affairs books and the Press, are
assertions by the fiat of power using its control of the narrative,
i.e., the Mighty Wurlitzer. The official narratives of today are the
absolute facts of the historians of tomorrow with no minority report
on the official record. Popular dissenting voices of course are
merely 'conspiracy theories'
(http://tinyurl.com/Anatomy-Conspiracy-Theory), shortly to be
medically diagnosed as victims of delusions suffering from mental
illnesses for which medical and legal groundwork is now being laid.
George
Orwell captured the hard reality of historiography and its
significance to the manufacturing of myths that come to control the
public mind in the present, in the opening pages of his seminal fable
“Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Written in the aftermath of World
War II when narrative control of the causes of the two inexplicable
world wars and their cataclysmic events were at its zenith, Orwell
blurted out the key political axiom underwriting what passes as
“knowledge”:
“Who
controls the past, controls the future ;
who controls the present, controls the past”
who controls the present, controls the past”
Therefore,
as is empirically evidenced throughout history and in our present
modernity, control of the narrative of history, and of current
affairs, has been the imperative of all rulers from time immemorial.
It is a tool as old as hegemony, as old as mankind. Only fools, and
imperial scholars in the service of empire, whether playing their
protagonist or antagonist in fake opposition, ignore it, omit to
disclose it, or minimize its impact on the theology and doctrines
they happen to be preaching to their flock. And that's also how we
can identify the mercenaries and prostitutes despite the color and
style of their garb, robe, wedding dress, or turban. It is to be
expected that they are presented to the public in the most pious and
virtuous moral tones that Machiavelli and Hegelian Dialectic can
muster.
Ergo,
it follows that the purported facts of history, as well as of current
affairs, have to be treated as being more akin to clues, at times
false clues and red herrings as in a crime scene, rather than as
statements of fact. Therefore, the most rational model for
understanding history and its linkages to current affairs, is the
forensic one. Like the forensic eye of a crime detective, such as
Agatha Christie's famous fictional character Hercule Poirot,
pondering upon the interconnections of clues, statements of purported
eyewitnesses, drawing deductions, making logical inferences, and
using new methods for uncovering unknown clues not visible to the
naked eye in the visible light spectrum, such as employing
ultraviolet and infrared regions of the spectrum to see what the
naked eye can't perceive – all part and parcel of the forensics
employed for apprehending a convoluted crime, solving a puzzle.
Thus,
studying history and current affairs is like studying a crime scene
or solving a puzzle. Its path is almost like the weaving of the many
horizontal and vertical threads on a loom to fashion a carpet, or
knit a Jacquard. That fashions a perspective from the underlying
clues borne of empiricism. Weaving many perspectives from the same
empirical elements, just like weaving many carpets from the same
colored threads, is possible. And just like some detectives are plain
wrong, and one right in identifying the real criminal, the same
challenges beset the study of history. To find that right one master
criminal, or the right perspective which explains the engagement of
power and its narrative, surrounded tous azimuth by an endless
trail of false clues, patsies taking the fall, and lies turned into
sacred truths.
To
the extent that a perspective is empirical, cohesive, is able to
coherently resolve the riddles of power and its infestations of the
mind, it cannot be refuted by mere assertions, threats, and calumny.
It can stand in a court of law on its own merit, provided of course,
it isn't a kangaroo court administering the sovereign's justice, a
Military Tribunal administering the victor's justice, or a tournament
of justice run by the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland.
End
Excerpt [palestine]
We
can easily appreciate from the preceding analysis of historiography
that conclusions derived from the records of history must always
remain tentative; subject to refinement – for history can just
as much lie as it can tell the truth. But even that truth, when
history does factually convey it, is often merely a chronicle of
visible events, dates and places, who came into and out of power
when, which battles were fought and won, speeches that were handed
down, etc. It is almost always devoid of any examination of the
hidden forces and invisible motivations that shaped those events,
sometimes near, sometimes far, and sometimes disparate. There is
obviously never an examination of history as a crime scene.
Sometimes, truth from fiction is as indiscernible for history as it
is for current affairs. GIGO epistemology straightforwardly ensures
that outcome – garbage of current affairs manufactured by the
Mighty Wurlitzer (see http://tinyurl.com/MightyWurlitzer) becomes the
veritable records of history for future generations to examine as
“truths”.
We
can even experience that for ourselves today in how myths masquerade
as truth from all pulpits in the service of power. What makes the
past pulpits any more holier, any more different? It is the same God
now as was then. The same gods too. And the same man, as well as the
same superman.
Ergo,
if today we see deceit with our own eyes in the inflection of power
and its narratives, it is foolish to expect that the past was any
different. The fact is that it isn't any different.
Therefore,
all history, even in its most pristine narrative form, harbors a germ
of falsehood and has to be prudently examined with a forensic eye to
improve its reality to myth ratio. Sometimes, a narrative may capture
a world of events to accurately express the perception of reality,
like Plato's depiction of the trial and defence of Socrates; but it
cannot be shown that Socrates ever uttered any of those sentences
which Plato attributes to him in his famous trilogy: The Apologia,
The Crito and The Phædo, all of which have
reference to the trial, imprisonment and death of Socrates. At other
times, there are fundamental impediments to capturing the reality as
it actually is, rather than as it is perceived – and once again
Plato gives a defining example of it in his classic Simile of the
Cave in his most seminal book: The Republic.
End
Excerpt
When
one is chained by their neck from cradle to grave and bombarded with
images on the screen in front of them, and that becomes one's reality
---- escape from that prison of the mind is (or can be) well-nigh
impossible. If these people are the narrators of sacred memories, or
come to write history books and works of profound scholarship ---
what can one expect, except GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out) down
endless generations of pious rehearsals! To claim exceptionalism,
which most everyone does for their preferred narrative of history,
like Henry Ford shrewdly said, is bunk.
From
the well known Occam's razor principle which is to choose the
fewest and simplest possible axioms of faith, beliefs, assumptions,
presuppositions to construct the rational scientific method on the
anvil of falsifiability, to the belief in supernatural as the
unfalsifiable axiom of the immanent psyche that distinguish humans
from non spiritual beings, are all presuppositions that are believed
to be true but cannot always be proven to be true. These axioms can
potentially only be proved to be false (possibly at some future
time).
When
that is the case, that an axiom of faith, a presupposition of truth,
can eventually be shown to be false, it is called falsifiability.
That is the foundation of modern rational epistemology as well as the
scientific method --- necessary presuppositions of convenience which
can eventually be shown to be false (unless proved to be true along
the way when it is no longer considered an axiom but a demonstrable
fact). Why is that? Because certain fundamentals cannot always be
proved to be true even if they may be strongly believed to be true.
For
instance, take the example of geometry that we use in our everyday
life, and have been using for over two thousand years. Its principal
axiom, parallels lines don't meet at infinity, can never be proved to
be true. Because no one can go to infinity and come back to report
that they witnessed or measured that yes indeed parallel lines did
not even meet at infinity. It can, however, be shown to be false
under certain circumstances, such as in relativistic physics, where
space-time becomes curved (distorted) due to gravity effect (as
empirically demonstrated for the General Theory of Relativity during
the total solar eclipse of 1919 when the New York Times headlined the
confirmation that light, normally observed to only travel in straight
lines, can bend: “Lights All Askew In The Heavens – Stars
Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to be, but Nobody Need
Worry”). This effect can cause two parallel lines, one effected
by that space-time gravity field, to intersect with the other not
effected by the gravity field at some distant point. Thus, the
fundamental premise under which the parallel lines axiom of Euclidean
geometry works is only when space-time is not under relativistic
effect. But that axiom of Euclidean geometry still cannot be proved
to be false in non relativistic three dimensional space. It is just
assumed to be true without proof and falsifiability, primarily
because it is convenient, accords with daily human experience as well
as commonsense, and helps formulate as well as solve one, two and
three dimensional problems encountered in non relativistic
space-time.
When
something is assumed to be true without evidentiary proof, what
scientists call empirical evidence, it is akin to belief, faith. The
entire Euclidean geometry is based on such an axiom of faith.
In
the same way, in mental life, we hypothesize beliefs that are
immanent and constitute our core beliefs. Some of these, over time,
have been shown to be false, in which case we abandoned them (but not
easily). Such as belief in lightening / thunder, or the lunar / solar
eclipses, or celestial movement of heavenly bodies upon which
Zodiacal astrology is based, or the black cat crossing the path, or
prescriptive mantras, etc., are related to human affairs and have a
major (or minor) impact on its causality (except of course through
the placebo effect which is demonstrated to be true and has become
integral part of the process of modern medical science in what's
called double blind studies). So, these immanent human axioms of
personal faith which in the earlier primitive societies governed not
just individual human behavior, but also societal collective
behavior, have largely been abandoned (with some difficulty for
many), with evidentiary demonstration that these personal and
societal axioms of faith are false and mere superstitions.
But
other personal and societal religious axioms of faith, such as life
after death or Afterlife, the Hereafter, or Heaven and
Hell, or Day of Judgment, or existence of Angels, cannot ever be
proved to be false (nor demonstrated to be true). For no one has
returned from the dead to reliably inform us whether they found these
to be true or false, and whether or not, as their moment of death
approached, they finally witnessed the reality of the long believed
mythical Death Angel who came to extract their soul into
purgatory. And if someone were to return from the dead and if they
did not bring back evidence of what they witnessed with them, how
would anyone ever validate / adjudicate upon that personal
witnessing, testimony? If multiple people reported the same, perhaps
they were all just hallucinating, or perhaps they did indeed meet
with the Death Angel and other artifacts of Afterlife
that has informed the religions of man from time immemorial. How can
anyone else objectively tell the difference however – except,
once again, (a) in either choosing to believe them on the basis of
their shared beliefs alone, or (b) in rejecting that testimony based
on the axiom of materialistic conception of nature that nothing can
exist after bodily death (which is technically defined by modern
medicine as the measurable ceasing of the brain's electrical activity
on the EEG monitor), and thus all such immanent experiences of
returning from the dead can at best only be hallucinations due to the
mind's temporary catatonic state.
Such
axioms of faith that can never be shown to be false, and just
believed to be true, are called unfalsifiable axioms. These axioms
are also the foundational basis of world religions, specifically
those which claim the validity of Divine Revelation. And also those
that claim continuity of human existence in global consciousness ala
Hinduism, and its variants seen in new age religions including
animism (dict: belief in spiritual beings or agencies; the belief
that natural objects, natural phenomena, and the universe itself
possess souls; the belief that natural objects have souls that may
exist apart from their material bodies; the doctrine that the soul is
the principle of life and health) and animatism
(dict: the attribution of consciousness to inanimate objects and
natural phenomena).
But
is Divine Revelation itself an unfalsifiable axiom? That obviously
depends on the definition of Divine, which of course must precede
addressing the question of Divine Revelation, and that subject is
taken up systematically in the next two sections.
How
about the existence of consciousness beyond materialism, and its
derivative beliefs such as reincarnation, or interconnection
to what's termed cosmic consciousness,
animism, animatism? Once again, “proof” is usually
by way of one's own personal belief system and not by way of the
scientific method which obviously cannot be applied directly
to what is not material, what cannot be observed by its instruments,
and what cannot be measured by its instruments. So, making
distinction between say, animatism and Divine Revelation is not
permitted by the zealot materialists who tend to lump all
non-materialist constructs, whether most ridiculous and absurd, or
most profound, into the same “reject” category.
This
is exemplary, even the epitome, of the problem of presupposition –
axiomatic dogmas crippling epistemology. It leads to the dogmatic
denial of that which is even amenable to the scientific method.
The
scientific method can perhaps be applied indirectly for ascertaining
certain non-material but existential phenomenon that is dogmatically
denied by materialist science. For instance, adjudicating on ESP, and
its related effects such as telepathy, for instance, observing that
dogs know when their owners are coming home, homing pigeons uncannily
always know how to return home regardless of how “blinded”
they are made in test experiments, birds in flight always know how to
change their flight paths in sudden turns in perfect sync without
running into each other, identical twins feeling each others feelings
and thoughts, the feeling of being stared at by others and turning
around to often find them looking at you, etc. These empirical
observations of behavior of living beings indicate the presence of
some non-materialistic and hitherto unknown telepathic processes and
mechanisms in play that are not understood by the materialistic
conception of science. I.e., phenomenon demonstrated by living beings
which cannot be proved to be false, and is instead observed to be
true many a time, begging an explanation beyond the denials offered
by the dogmas of orthodox materialist scientists of the Richard
Dawkins variety (the Dawkinsian clan, Dawkinsianism).
Some intriguing scientific experiments have indeed been devised to
demonstrate their existential validity by the rebel extraordinaire,
Cambridge University biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (see
http://sheldrake.org/), to beggar all materialistic theories of
nature to date. William Shakespeare had way too presciently captured
the crippling of the dogmatic mind in Hamlet for all times. It is
especially pertinent to our own epoch of knowledge explosion which,
instead of humility, tends to confer unbounded hubris upon the
arrogant mind: “There are more things
in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Based
on the above short introduction, it does not take a great deal of
intelligence to perceive the impact of dogmas on crippling
epistemology when the beliefs or axioms are absurd, rooted in
authority figures as their source of truth, or in immanent
superstitions of mental life. What we believe to be true and what can
be shown to be true are two different matters.
Thus
falsifiability has become the corner stone of modern science. The
axioms of science are deliberately made falsifiable --- as in the
Occam's razor principle --- presuppositions which are
initially assumed to be true but which can eventually either be
demonstrated to be true (in which case they are no longer axioms but
facts) or proved to be false (in which case they are abandoned), or
circumscribed to their applicability limit, as is done in Euclidean
geometry for its axiom of parallel lines which are now confined only
to non relativistic space-time.
Science
dies to reincarnate as religion if, or when, its axioms turn to dogma
and become unquestionable, inscrutable, incontrovertible,
unfalsifiable. There are several examples of this throughout history
down to our own enlightened times: from the earth is the center of
the universe dogma of the Church of antiquity to the latter day
global warming dogma of the world superstate. While the former
was a genuine false belief, the latter is uber Machiavelli driving a
political agenda (see
http://tinyurl.com/Global-Warming-New-Religion).
Under
modern science's materialistic axiom of faith that all existence is
material and death of material is death of existence (non
animism), the non falsifiable axioms of faith of world religions
that are predicated on non materialistic existence, on spiritual
transcendence beyond the body, where the material body is seen only
as a temporal container, have been denigrated and marginalized as
superstitions. All non materialism is treated with equal contempt by
latter day materialist reductionists –– the absurd belief
in a cat crossing the path causing one harm, and belief in God or
Divine Revelation, are treated the same! The latter is often
dismissed by equating it to the former, and deliberately so by the
dogmatic Dawkinsian clan. The same transpires with those who
create absurd theologies as the avant-garde in thought like the
strawman of animatism (dict: the attribution of consciousness
to inanimate objects and natural phenomena), which the Dawkinsian
clan is all too happy to equate with belief in God and Divine
Revelation. That blind-sight of the Dawkinsian clan is not
mere psychological cataract. It is well crafted political theory
which underwrites “Will to Power”.
Some
in this Dawkinsian clan are surely honest exponents of their
own personal Pollyannaish
beliefs as they zealously
herald the way to Secular Humanism as the next stage of human
evolution whereby, human beings, now liberated from the clutches of
superstitious theism which has been the leading cause of all
misanthropy throughout history (as they argue), make their own lofty
declarations of universal human rights and live happily ever after
(see http://tinyurl.com/HGWells-Universal-Human-Rights). These
well-intentioned useful idiots often see scarcity of resources
and terrorism of the pirates as the fundamental problems to be solved
by Secular Humanism and the problem of primacy never occurs to their
indoctrinated minds – indoctrinated no differently in their new
religion than any theist zealot of antiquity (see
http://tinyurl.com/Problem-Primacy-not-Scarcity).
While
others, cunning predators preying on human instincts, are harvesters
of those Pollyannaish
beliefs to diabolically foster their own
political agendas to achieve their one-world empire. This is no
different than how suicide bombers, ardent believers in their own
“divine mission”, are diabolically harvested by their
terrestrial handlers who create, encourage, train and fund them to
pursue their beliefs to the very end for the enticement of heavenly
maidens, while actually serving the geopolitical interests of
policy-makers upstream (see http://tinyurl.com/Superman-Morality).
This
is how “militant Islam” is constructed by the Western
hegemons to serve their own political agenda for their Hegelian
Dialectic of having an endless enemy to wage endless wars against
(see http://tinyurl.com/hijacking-word-islam). This is also how
insurgency is fabricated by the state, both domestically as well as
in far-away places using the discontent of the local peoples, which
often the state is itself the cause of, to justify its own
counter-insurgency operations to achieve its political agendas which
it otherwise could not dignify (see
http://tinyurl.com/insurgency-counterinsurgency)
And
that is the open secret behind promulgating Secular Humanism so
freely by the West today --- where its most zealot exponents often
find themselves pushing against open doors with sanctuary, prizes,
accolades, applause, and career advancement awaiting them to
continually tickle their egos. It is the Trojan horse to subvert
world religions which the powers that be, see as impediment to the
global dystopia they have planned for mankind (see
http://tinyurl.com/Islam-vs-Secular-Humanism
).
The
impact of this axiomatic presupposition of materialistic philosophy
upon which the fundamental beliefs and practices of modern political
theories, modern science, modern medicine, modern theology are all
constructed: what we personally believe, what policies we legislate,
what projects we fund, how we manage our collective well-being
including healthcare, how we make war and peace, etc., is nothing
short of monumental. The consequent of this core materialist belief,
which I call the first-cause axiom of modernity, meaning, it is the
first-cause, the root-head, the foundational presupposition of modern
epistemology that has fashioned the dogmas of modernity, is rapidly
leading to the global scientific technetronic dystopia
encircling all non-primitive civilizations today. The principal
consequences are: (a) secular naturalism
(how we understand the world), (b) secular
humanism (how we understand human life), (c) will
to power (our political theory and the basis of
exceptionalism among the self-proclaimed shepherds of human life),
and (d) social Darwinianism
(our social theory and the basis of herding and culling human sheep
and “useless eaters”). That is the profound reality of
crippled epistemology --- in the hands of the cunning Superman, it
leads to humanity's enslavement.
(a)
Secular Naturalism
This
is the dogmatic philosophy of materialist reductionism. It separates
physics (the how) from metaphysics (the why), and focuses on
discovering the how by reducing all existence into its innate
material and physical components.
- It postulates that all natural existence, and all natural phenomenon, from galaxies to quarks, anywhere in the universe, is based on, and governed by, quantifiable and fixed laws of nature which apply universally to these innate material components, whether or not man has discovered all of them as yet.
- These laws of nature are universal and apply equally to all material existence in all frames of references everywhere in the universe, including to man himself (there is nothing out of band about man's existence), and including to that which the mind of man or his instruments can and cannot directly observe or measure but are necessary to hypothesize to explain existence. Such as: dark-matter, fields, waves, fundamental particles, singularities, first-cause of existence such as the big-bang, final-cause of existence such as its natural end-state which, in the Aristotelian thought, used to be the metaphysical or teleological “why”, the purpose of existence, but with the separation of physics from metaphysics in the seventeenth century, is now substituted with what is the “end-state” of existence.
- When material existence ceases to exist in its physical form, that entity which embodied that physical form ceases to exist completely.
- Material existence has no inherent purpose except to exist by the laws of nature which govern its creation, evolution, functioning, and its end.
- It is meaningless to ask the “why” of material existence which is left to philosophy or religion to answer as it has no place in the laws of nature.
- The empirical methods of science known as the scientific method, are the best approach to understand that “how” of physical existence.
- The focus on understanding physical existence is sufficient to explain all forces of nature and the nature of all existence.
- Nature has no a priori purpose and came about by natural processes that are governed by natural laws, not all of which may be understood or known at any given moment.
- The natural laws are “a-moral” and “secular”, and neither concern themselves to the “why” of existence, nor to the “values” of existence (such as moral law), nor to the “purpose” of existence (such as its goal).
- The philosophy of materialist reductionism denies all existence that is not physical, not governed by the physical laws of nature, including transcendental existence, spiritual existence, and existence outside of its natural materialist manifestation such as the soul and consciousness.
- When the physical body dies it leaves no soul behind. When the physical brain dies it leaves no consciousness behind.
- In the materialist philosophy a man dying and a star exploding are equivalent. They both cease to exist completely after death, apart from the physical residues they each leave behind, the lifeless cadaver and debris-radiation fields respectively, which (obviously) no longer contain the innate characteristic of what existed before death.
These
presuppositions and corollaries of materialist reductionism therefore
guide the processes of not just the hard sciences, but also all
social sciences as well as theology and philosophy, and limit the
understanding of existence to the ambit of these presuppositions. To
what extent these presuppositions have become dogmas that serve
narrow self-interests and political agendas is demonstrated by
empiricism. Pursuit of science today is a-moral, its understanding of
existence solely materialistic and physical, its mega-funding mainly
for primacy and profit imperatives, and its advancements the
harbinger of dystopia and seeds of self-destruction. The
presupposition of the nature of man being fundamentally a material
construct with no spiritual component --- that latter notion being
the gratuitous appendage of how societies evolved from its primitive
state when such superstitions among all peoples of the ancient world,
were necessary to explain not just natural phenomenon, but also to
give meaning to life and rationalize away the many inequities
besetting man from time immemorial, all of which have now been
supplanted by the wisdom of science and the Will to Power --- is the
harbinger of hedonism, sense of emptiness, despair, loneliness,
isolation, purposelessness. It has led to large prison populations on
the one hand, and rising psychological discontents in the general
populations on the other. This manifests itself empirically in:
- a) rising behavioral dysfunction (such as loss of public empathy, as witnessed in the wild cheering among Americans when watching the slaughter of the untermensch on their television screens; easy acceptance of inhuman treatment and torture of prisoners as a necessary evil, as witnessed in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq's prisons under American occupation; easy acceptance of the paradigm of guilty unless proven innocent, as witnessed in the Patriot Acts and police-state deployed worldwide; increasing anger and violence; etc.);
- b) rising social dysfunction (such as living in servitude under authority figures as mark of high civilization; increase in dysfunctional families, alienation, social violence, global wealth disparity, unpardonable impoverishment worldwide; lifestyles that encourage self-absorption for the haves while countenancing patience for have-nots whose “death rates must go up” (McNamara, 1970) to curb world population explosion; creation of eugenics international policies (suitably disguised), such as that witnessed in NSSM 200 (Kissinger, 1974) that envisioned food as a weapon to curb global birth rates in least developed nations before it became a threat to the affluent West's national security: “Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?”; sky rocketing crime rates in industrialized societies, as witnessed in the West which has some of the highest concentration of prison inmates anywhere in the world, especially in the United States of America which has become the prison capital of the world; recruitment for soldiery among dysfunctional populations, plentiful harvests of economic conscription, both of which lead to war crimes against humanity during field deployment, and PTSD when soldiers return home to feelings of intense isolation, unable to relate to their families, unable to reintegrate, and suffering mental anguish for the inhuman butchery they have committed and witnessed; etc.);
- and c) rising mental psychoses (such as mental illnesses going through the roof, as seen in increasing big-pharma profits for psychotropic drugs; the inability to appreciate beauty of a lovely sunrise and sunset; etc.); all heralding new discontents in the materialist civilizations.
Cambridge
University British biologist Rupert Sheldrake in his iconoclastic
book and public talks on this subject variously titled: The
Science Delusion – Dispelling the The Ten Dogmas of Materialism
and Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, observes of the present state
of the materialist axiom of science: “Despite
all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now
facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth
century.” “Materialism provided a seemingly simple,
straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but
twenty-first-century science has left it behind. Its promises have
not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by
hyperinflation.” The book identifies the
following ten dogmas of materialism which have straight-jacketed
science, understanding of both the nature of man and the world around
him, and which limit its advancement due to the almost church-like
orthodoxy that controls the scientific outlook (what's funded, what's
published, what's followed-up):
- Dogma 1 is the assumption that nature is mechanical, or machine-like, that everything in nature is like a machine. Animals are like machines, plants are like machines and we’re like machines, lumbering robot in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase our brains are like genetically programmed computers. So that’s the first assumption, being in science since the 17th century.
- Dogma 2 is the assumption that matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made of unconscious matter, all of nature is made of unconscious matter, our bodies are made of unconscious matter, but for some peculiar reason our brains become conscious and that is one of the big problems in materialist science. Consciousness ought not to exist at all.
- Dogma 3 is the assumption that the laws of nature are fixed, they are the same at the moment of the big bang as they are today and they will be the same forever. (And so they’re constants and that is why they are called constant, things like the speed of light and gravitation are constant.)
- Dogma 4 is the assumption that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same, it all came into being at the big bang, it’s been the same ever since and it will be the same forever.
- Dogma 5 is the assumption that nature is purposeless. There are no purposes in animals or plants or in life as a whole. And the entire evolutionary process has no purpose; it’s just come about by blind chance in the laws of nature.
- Dogma 6 is the assumption that biological inheritance is material, it’s all genetic or epigenetic or possibly inside the epigenetic inheritance, but in any case material.
- Dogma 7 is the assumption that memories are stored as material traces inside the brain. All your memories are inside your head in some way, stored in nerve endings or phosphor related proteins or no one knows quite how, but the assumption is they are all in the brain.
- Dogma 8 is the assumption that your mind is inside your head, it’s an aspect of the activity of the brain.
- Dogma 9 is the assumption that psychic phenomena like telepathy are illusory, they appear to exist, but they are not real. That’s because the mind is inside the head and can’t have any effects at a distance.
- Dogma 10 is the assumption that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works. Alternative and complementary therapies may appear to work, but that’s only because people have got better anyway or it’s the placebo effect. And that’s why governments and medical research funding and so on funds only mechanistic medicine based upon the principle of ‘the body is a machine’, working on chemistry and physics, so it can only be treated chemically or physically by drugs or surgery. And of course that is very effective up to a point, but it’s just part of medicine, anyway that’s the assumption. (From transcript of one of Sheldrake's talks)
Rupert
Sheldrake writes in the Introduction of The Science Delusion:
“Together,
these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism,
whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material
or physical, even minds. This belief-system became dominant within
science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted.
Many scientists are unaware that materialism
is an assumption: they simply think of it as science, or the
scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview.
They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss
it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis. In everyday
usage, materialism refers to a way of life. In the spirit of radical
scepticism, I turn each of these ten doctrines into a question.
Entirely new vistas open up when a widely
accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an enquiry, rather
than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the
assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a
question: ‘Is nature mechanical?’ The assumption that
matter is unconscious becomes ‘Is matter unconscious?’
And so on.” --- (see http://sheldrake.org/)
The
hard reality of the forces behind the mechanistic medicine of Dogma
10, is the total domination of big-pharma in medicine and healthcare
industries worldwide. The total orthodoxy of big-pharma's medicine,
regulated by the American Drug Trust and owned by the Money
Trust, has taken over the world of healthcare to only permit
those treatments, fund those research and developments, and pay for
those healthcare modalities, from which big-pharma can make big
profits (see Medical Monopoly in Eustace Mullins' Murder by
Injection, 1988). This medical orthodoxy denies the efficacy of
natural medicine and refuses to fund the discovery and development of
natural remedies that nature has provided for a song – for
there is no profit in it. This medical orthodoxy has taken upon
itself to dictate to mankind how they shall heal themselves, and in
the process, has become integral part of the military-industrial
complex of the Western primacy system to rigidly control mankind.
Virtually every discipline of medicine, and virtually every approved
treatment of every disease, is based on the dogmas prevalent in that
area. And these dogmas limit the treatment options available to the
patients in the mainstream of medicine. Heart disease, diabetes,
cancer treatment, psychiatry are all driven by dogmas both of
big-pharma and the consequence of secular naturalism under which the
practitioners of medicine are trained, licensed and regulated (see
http://tinyurl.com/Truth-Modern-Medicine).
Arguably,
the field most ripe with dogmas is psychiatry. In his 1973 paper
published in Science: On Being Sane in Insane Places, Dr.
David L. Rosenhan of Stanford University, inquired into the
foundational question of psychiatry in his empirical study of
American psychiatric hospitals: If sanity
and insanity exist, how shall we know them? (see
http://bonkersinstitute.org/rosenhan.html) And concluded that
psychiatry is rife with dogmas and presuppositions that beggar
objective diagnosis: “It is clear
that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric
hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special
environment in which the meaning of behavior can easily be
misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an
environment -- the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation,
mortification, and self-labeling -- seem undoubtedly
counter-therapeutic.”
Today,
psychiatry is completely taken over by the neuroscience of managing
brain biochemistry with designer psychotropic drugs for virtually
every behavioral / psychiatric diagnosis. New mental illnesses are
continually defined in the manual of psychiatry called DSM, for which
big-pharma continues to design new high margin psychotropic drugs,
and which medical professionals continue to prescribe to their
patients who are rapidly descending into younger and younger age
groups.
Cardiovascular
disease has been so taken over by big-pharma for-profit dogma that it
must be mentioned here. Coronary Artery Disease, or CAD, directly
related to modern food and lifestyle, is the leading heart disease in
the world today. Its first-line treatment is to immediately insert
stents to open up clogged arteries during the diagnostic process
itself, called PCI, Percutaneous Coronary Intervention. The moment
someone experiences chest pain or angina, and taken to the hospital,
Cath-Lab is the first stop right after the emergency room has
stabilized the patient. And invariably high profit margin heart
stents are inserted with PCI under dubious (exaggerated) information
given to the patients of the efficacy of the procedure. The New York
Times reported: “Every year, more than half a million
Americans undergo procedures to have a narrowed coronary artery
propped open with a small metal mesh tube, or stent. In an emergency,
when someone is having a heart attack, the operation can be
lifesaving. But far too often, studies show, stents continue to be
implanted in patients who stand to gain little if any benefit. Last
month, two of the country’s largest medical organizations
identified the procedure commonly used to place a stent —
called a percutaneous coronary intervention, or angioplasty —
as one of five highly overused medical interventions.”
(http://tinyurl.com/NYT-stents-overused-15Aug2013 ).
Cardiovascular
surgeon Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD, of Cleveland Clinic Wellness
Institute, challenged the practice by comparing the present CAD
therapies to the dogmas of the nineteenth century: Is
the Present Therapy for Coronary Artery Disease the Radical
Mastectomy of the Twenty-First Century? (see
http://dresselstyn.com/Esselstyn_Caldwell_Article.pdf) Esselstyn
began his challenge with the understatement: “To
fully grasp how so many smart, right-minded people could get it so
wrong, it might help to start with a quick review of medical
history.” And he put his finger on the principal
dogma reigning not just in his discipline, but in several other
medical disciplines as well: “For the minority of heart
patients, specifically those in the midst of heart attacks or acute
coronary syndromes, stents or coronary artery bypass may be
lifesaving. For the rest, none of the present therapies targets the
cause: the Western diet. As a consequence,
the disease marches on in all patients, which leads to more drugs,
stents, and bypasses, increasing heart damage, heart failure, and,
too often, death, from an essentially benign, food-borne illness.”
Iconoclast Esselstyn has persisted in challenging the medical dogma
prevalent in CAD therapy by presenting original research and
scientific data collected over years of
following patients that CAD is in fact reversible by nutritional
intervention with plant based diet (see: A Way to reverse CAD?
http://dresselstyn.com/JFP_06307_Article1.pdf ).
The
dogmas of modern medicine are not merely theological, but designed to
make permanent paying customers for big-pharma as part of the modern
medical profession. They deliberately limit treatment options for the
public by crippling the epistemology under which the medical
profession and healthcare providers are trained, function, and offer
treatment plans / knowledge to the public.
Is
it trivial to undo big-pharma's full spectrum control of medicine and
healtcare, to introduce laws to permit natural medicine to co-exist,
to fund its research, to modify medical school training curriculum to
incorporate its wisdom? To the naïve mind, it appears as simple
to initiate as the stroke of a pen!
(b)
Secular Humanism
Secular
Humanism is the outgrowth of the presuppositions of Secular
naturalism and deals with the sources of legal and moral codes that
govern and direct human beings. This source is exclusively the mind
of man, and not some supernatural, transcendental, spiritual or
divine source. In the laws of nature there is no such construct as
moral law, legal law, or value system, except that which naturally
falls out from evolutionary sociobiology
of Darwinianism, called social Darwinianism. The
first-cause of human existence on earth, like all life on earth, is
chance or accident. And social Darwinianism is the only
natural behavior as seen in the jungle, and arguably the only natural
“value system” if one may call it that, which may be
attributed to the laws of nature. Morality is but a subjective value
system and all spiritual questions of the “why” of
existence are immanent, i.e., philosophical, in the mind of man,
entirely abstract, and not part of the laws of nature that govern the
physical world. Naturalists therefore treat moral, legal, and
philosophical questions that regulate both human behavior and human
destiny (i.e., final-cause), as mere utilitarian conventions created
by political thinkers and philosophers for inducing social harmony
and regulating human behavior.
Secular
Humanism is the benign or Pollyannaish version sold by the Übermensch
(Nietzschean Superman) to the gullible public to create useful
idiots championing its cause. The reality however is what
Nietzsche termed “der Wille zur Macht” (the Will to
Power). In his final philosophical work published posthumously, Thus
Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaimed: “God is dead.”
And he presented the path to man's accelerated social (and
biological) evolution through his “Will to Power”. Here
we first look at the Pollyannaish version of Secular Humanism and
take up the reality version next. The Pollyannaish version of Secular
Humanism was described by this author in his 2011 study of hegemony
and multiculturalism titled: Islam and Knowledge vs.
Socialization.
Begin
Excerpt
The
following Biblical Commandment from antiquity was, and still is, at
least in my view, both complete and sufficient for governing the
peaceable, equitable, and virtuous conduct of mankind:
|
“Do
unto Others as you have others do unto you.” ---
The Bible: Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31; Old Testament Mosaic Law;
Socrates; Confucius; Solon
|
So,
why does mankind need anything more than that one primary fundamental
Biblical statement? Indeed, one can easily surmise that all
beneficial national constitutions, international and local laws,
trade treaties, foreign policies, inter and intra governing
principles, and even effective principles for dispute resolutions,
are logically derivable from just that one ancient first principle,
for a fairly equitable co-existence of mutual benefit for all
mankind. There'd be no room for masters and slaves under the
corollaries derived from such an egalitarian first principle!
While
that universal pithy wisdom is deemed Biblical, I have found evidence
of its truism in other antiquity as cited above. For instance, Solon
the Athenian law giver, according to Plutarch's Lives, when
asked which city he thought was well-governed, said:
|
“That
city where those who have not been injured take up the cause of
one who has, and prosecute the case as earnestly as if the wrong
had been done to themselves.”
--- Solon in Plutarch's Lives
|
Even
beyond divine religion, in the realm of logic and rational empiricism
alone, the following operations-research (OR) logical formulation due
to Bertrand Russell, a man of considerable beliefs in no religion, is
the most commonsensical recipe of governing peaceable human conduct.
In my own succinct rendition, Bertrand Russell's formulation goes
something like this (and I am putting it in single quotes to indicate
that the formulation belongs to Russell but the words may not all be
his):
|
'Maximize
individual happiness while minimizing social conflict for
optimizing the overall common-good.' --- Bertrand
Russell's prescription to do away with religion as the bearer of
moral law, probably in 'Why I am not a Christian' and
similar writings
|
With
just a little bit of reflection, one will see that Bertrand Russell
captures the beneficial essence of many religions, including Islam,
in at least so far as “haquq-al-ibad”, i.e., the rights
of man upon man, otherwise known as moral law, are concerned, quite
admirably.
By
just using rational empathetic logic which hinges on spreading virtue
rather than glory, vice, hegemony, and conquest, one can come up with
reasonably equitable methods of governing oneself in any age, and
among any peoples.
However,
the Author of the Holy Qur'an advocating the path of mutual
co-existence to mankind through the perfection of its message which
it called “Islam”, is just as meaningless as man coming
up with his own protocol for mutual co-existence using his own
sensible logic and reason, if man is unwilling, or unable, to
implement the protocol:
|
“This
day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My favour
upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion.”
--- Verse fragment from Holy
Qur'an 5:3, 632 AD
|
|
“Hegemony
is as old as mankind.” --- Zbigniew
Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its
Geostrategic Imperatives, 1996 AD, pg. 3. The book's
dedication reads: “For my students—to help them
shape tomorrow's world”
|
Thus,
if nihilist followers of Zbigniew Brzezinski's predatory foreign
policies which predicate upon primacy and its geostrategic
imperatives because they believe that “Hegemony is as old as
mankind” so why change it, choose sociopathic mass
psychology to mobilize the public to villainy and infamy by
bequeathing to them only facile worldviews, well, that's not because
there is any shortage of great platitudinous recipes in either the
divine books of antiquity, or the modern mind of reason as the
Deistic philosophers of eighteenth century enlightenment argued (of
which Bertrand Russell was the atheist legatee).
That
choice, of exercising villainous hegemony, or equity and benevolence,
upon the 'untermenschen' is entirely man's of course. The Author of
the Holy Qur'an itself asserts that such a choice between life's
governing principles is entirely up to mankind in all its diversity
of existence, and is neither a monolithic diktat of triumphalism, nor
a choiceless matter like being born to one's parents:
|
“There
is no compulsion in religion.” --- Holy Qur’an
2:256
|
|
“There
surely came over man a period of time when he was a thing not
worth mentioning.” --- Holy Qur’an 76:1
|
|
“Surely
We have created man from a small life-germ uniting (itself): We
mean to try him, so We have made him hearing, seeing.” ---
Holy Qur’an 76:2
|
|
“Surely
We have shown him the way: he may be thankful or unthankful.”
--- Holy Qur’an 76:3
|
The
overarching point being, at the risk of being repetitious, whatever
the religion, whatever the people, and whatever the culture and
geography, man naturally gravitates firstly towards one's own kith
and kin, and secondly towards one's own socialization which
principally gives birth to one's dominant worldview. It is all but a
truism that just as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom
fighter, one man's “messiah” is another man's lunatic.
Referring
back to Zbigniew Brzezinski's ode to hegemony quoted at the very
beginning, the method of circumventing domestic impediments to the
“sustained exercise abroad
of genuinely imperial power”
become empirically self-evident:
|
“Moreover,
as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may
find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy
issues, except in the circumstance of a
truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.
[Because] the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands
popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or
challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being.”
--- Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, pgs. 211, 44
|
Sociopathy
of hegemony is the real problem. A problem that is as old as
hegemony, as old as mankind.
It thrives on the facile mind. Consequently, the sociopaths who often
rise to power easily, ensure that the public mind stays facile.
Making the public mind is the first art of governance from caliphate
to democracy --- for unlike a dictatorship, ruled at the point of the
bayonet, caliphate to democracy depend on a measure of consent from
the governed. Unless that governance is changed first, until the non
sociopaths in society force their way into ruling power to devalue
the villainy of the facile mind, all Divine Books will be
constricted, “mahjoor” (Holy Qur’an 25:30), and the
public mind shall forever remain chained to its unturning neck in
Plato's Cave.
End
Excerpt
The
reality is that primacy is a stronger categorical imperative of the
sociopathic elites in society than morality which occupies
theologians and hoi polloi. Learned people consistently fail
to understand this as they variously sublimate the problems of
modernity onto theology, religion, overpopulation, resource scarcity,
environmental pollution, etc., without realizing that each of those
“problems” are Machiavellianly amplified in the narrative
space, and concomitantly harvested to drive a predetermined agenda
which has nothing to do with the problem itself. For empirical
examples of primacy pretexts that cunningly scapegoat and harvest
religion, see Islam and Knowledge vs. Socialization (
http://tinyurl.com/Islam-Socialization ); that harvest environmental
problems, see Global Warming / Climate Change - What's it all
About? ( http://tinyurl.com/Global-Warming-A-New-Religion ). The
fact that this is openly admitted by the mainstream press that Global
Governance is piece-meal enabled by these pretexts (which they call
“crises”) which will naturally culminate in one-world
government, see Response to Financial Times Gideon Rachman's 'And
now for a world government' (
http://tinyurl.com/And-now-for-a-world-government ).
Primacy
is the first order dilemma plaguing mankind. It cannot be cured with
more laws, or morality transposition, be these from theism, atheism,
or secular humanism. Because primacy fundamentally sees itself as
amoral; beyond the bounds of the calculus of morality. And this
logically follows from the natural Darwinian order, the laws of
nature, the survival of the fittest. Primacy has in the past, and
will in the future, continue to act upon its own categorical
imperatives, while concerned citizens, too naïve to understand
primacy, look hither and thither. A recent example of this
misdirection is in the Documentary Thrive, for which this
scribe penned his vexed vivisection: The Road to No Where: The
Journey of Voluntary Servitude (see
http://tinyurl.com/Primacy-The-Road-to-No-Where ).
The
first-cause problem for civilizations, from time immemorial, is
primacy of their elite; their drive for a homogenized mono-culture in
a one-world empire in our own modernity, only temporarily disguised
from the masses under their respective flags. Not the lack of moral
codes --- for what can be better than the Golden Rule FOR EVERYONE
(unlike the American Constitution and its famous Bill of Rights which
apportioned inalienable rights only to those whom the founders
considered full human beings of “equal
station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle
them”, negroes and natives were not included in
that august category); nor the misguided question of world religions.
A man's religion, a society's preference for its own beliefs, their
maddening inertia for reformation, at least in the twenty-first
century, ought to be their own business and determined by their own
needs and values. But as in the colonial era, this is taken up by the
secular humanists as their new white man's burden. It is
permitted to thrive under the empire's many tools of primacy. To put
down world religions in the name of freedom of speech, is to push on
an open door by the useful idiots as far as the empire is
concerned --- for they are accomplishing its task for a song; for a
mild applause, prizes, career advancement. For the house nigger
mentality, it is gratifying just to bring his massa's message
to his own people as “he changes
from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white
man’s representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too
often he does not recognize what has happened to him.”
(see http://tinyurl.com/faq-intellectual-negro ).
(c)
Will to power
Nietzsche's
philosophy and its impact on society is described in this scribe's
essay: Morality derived from the Intellect leads to Enslavement!
(see http://tinyurl.com/Superman-Morality).
(d)
Social Darwinianism
This
is the final-cause (end state) of Secular Humanism – When led
by its ablest Nietzschean Superman, the creation of dystopia,
the rule by force of the elite and the endowed, the culling of
“useless eaters”, the survival of the fittest, the
genetic design of masses in some scientific caste / functional
hierarchy in an highly organized and controlled society. And theism,
all world religions, are impediments to Social Darwinianism. This is
analyzed in this scribe's open letter to Muslims: Islam vs.
Secular Humanism and World Government (see
http://tinyurl.com/Islam-vs-Secular-Humanism).
As
the direct consequence of the dogma of Secular Naturalism and
Nietzschean philosophy of “God is dead”, since there is
no absolute moral law any longer, and man's existence is only by
chance or by accident like any other life form, therefore, the
fundamental concept of equality among mankind is specious.
Equality
no more exists in nature than it does in the jungle. Is wolf equal to
sheep? Why should it apply universally to man – there is
nothing unique about him except for his intelligence. And that is to
be prized, alongside power and might, and including those with
special talents and abilities and skills that enrich human life, and
of course including cunning and sophistication, all of which
determine the survival of the species under the natural law of the
jungle, and so it should under the social Darwinian jungle. Thus,
some are more equal than others based largely on their power and
utility to society. This is expressed from time immemorial in all us
vs. them separations, from tribalism to ethnocentrism, sectarianism
to religionism, racism to culturalism, and nationalism to patriotism.
None in these collectives think the others are deserving of the same
rights and privileges, and at their worst moments, during warfare,
are inspired by intense hatred and demonization of the other. During
peace respites, the other is merely tolerated, either because of
their numbers, utility, or power. Today, by human rights conventions
on fancy parchments that are only enforced as long as self-interests
require that humanitarian facade. All over the world in the
twenty-first century, the lesser peoples are bearing the full brunt
of this principal axiom of social Darwinianism.
There
is no room for altruism except as a public relations scam. There is
no room for selflessness except to get simpletons and useful idiots
to sacrifice themselves for those with greater cunning. Noble lies
govern the behavior of Übermensch to manipulate the public mind
in pursuit of their higher goals. Those unable to meet the demands of
society, the “useless eaters”, must be weeded out, their
breeding curtailed, their populations managed like game on
reservation, and the most hardworking among them put to work in the
service of the elites with crumbs thrown at their feet to keep them
motivated even working harder and longer --- until they fall dead
from exhaustion.
Without
perceptive understanding of all that which is examined above, and
making the observation that what is going on under the very nose of
the public with increasing ubiquity, is not too far from what is
captured in those passages, the crippled epistemology that the public
mind is continually indoctrinated into, regardless of which
socioeconomic class it belongs to, leads it to willingly accept the
prevalent dogmas under one pretext or another.
The
more educated the mind, it is observed, the more years of academic
schooling it has gone through, and the more invested it is in its own
successes, the more likely it is to live under crippled epistemology
without even thinking of questioning it. The public mind, immersed in
dogmas from birth, becomes so accustomed to that tortuous state of
existence – the state of learned helplessness as
psychologists prefer to call it, a state that no rational mind really
ought to accept – that it comes to easily accept its servitude
to ruling dogmas with as much thought to rebelling as the sheep does
against the habit of mutton eating. Crippled epistemology completely
determines its attitude and behavior just like the sheepdog and the
shepherd's whistle do for the sheep.
The
following empirical behavior is described in this scribe's analysis
of current affairs titled: Imperial Surrogates and 'Terror
Central' in Operation Gladio Redux.
It belies all the tall claims of Pollyannaish pied pipers of all
flavors who are as much victims of their own dogmatic presuppositions
as the public minds they wish to lead.
Begin
Excerpt
George
Bernard Shaw, the most insightful playwright that tiny Anglo-Saxon
island of worldwide usurpation has ever produced, perceptively
observed of its weight in the Preface of his 1921 book of plays, Back
To Methuselah:
“[The]
hard fact being that we must not teach political science or
citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who
attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without
pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment
for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality
of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military
conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the
illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see
through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the
individuals whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years;
and the new generations are dragged back in the schools to the
morality of the fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when
they are defending the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they
are opposing to them the ideas of Richard III. Thus
the educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one:
indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the educational side of our
schools (to which, except under compulsion, children would not be
sent by their parents at all if they did not act as prisons in which
the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that save us from
being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down
the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out through the
schoolmaster.”
In
our own 21st century too, as in the century of George
Bernard Shaw, our well-intentioned men and women of science, arts and
letters, the lauded savants, domain experts and Nobel
laureates, all having advanced university degrees with “learned”
and “expert” prominently stamped upon their forehead,
display barely a nodding acquaintance with the subject of political
science; and mostly only with its name. The few who do inevitably go
to work for the Superman
of empire. Their only god has always been power, and Mephistopheles,
not truth, not compassion, and not concern
for the lesser humanity despite oft rehearsed public relations
in “humanist” terms. These
are the vulgar propagandists, the pied pipers whom the rest of the
super-educated useful idiots
of modernity, the well-intentioned “likkha-parrha jahils”,
hold sacred as if it was all revealed in the Sinai. Siding with the
tales of the emperor is also always “legal” and mostly
safe (so long as the emperor remains in power of course), often
bringing with it the unbridled
opportunities to profit, open doors, entry visas, social standing,
the privilege to flatter one's ego, and the gratification to carry
the white man's burden.
All of which easily blur any remaining distinction between
ideological mercenaries, and mere pimps and
prostitutes, useful idiots, and Uncle Toms.
Once the false narratives are uttered, it comes to make not even two
straws worth of difference who is a propagandist
by malevolent creed, who by opportunism, who by ignorance, and who by
psychological dispensation.
All
these brilliant savants of modernity, both man and Superman,
the perennial breed in every society who hold the pens, lead its
rocket science, and make its public's mind, have been educated to the
point that adding two plus two correctly is their most dreaded pons
asinorum, taxing both their mind
and their consciences so feverishly that it is never to be crossed
publicly.
George
Bernard Shaw couldn't have spoken a more truer half-sentence in his
entire half-century of most perceptive and progressive writings than
this one: “Thus the educated
man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one: indeed it is the
inefficiency and sham of the educational side of our schools ... that
save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of
drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.”
The
remaining half-sentence this sanguine bedrock of moral sanity left
unstated, perhaps only due to some polite consideration for the
British empire then on the wane, and not due to being victim of the
schoolmasters he lamented: the description of the empirical Superman
who already exists. That brilliant Social Darwinian among the
Neo-Darwinians, infested with extreme predatory instincts and extreme
pathological evil, who replaced God after Nietzsche killed Him in the
name of giving birth to the immanent Superman
of the future! Instead, Shaw, just as immoderately as the
Neo-Darwinians, misattributed the mayhem that he was witnessing in
the aftermath of World War I: “At
the present moment one half of Europe, having knocked the other half
down, is trying to kick it to death, and may succeed: a procedure
which is, logically, sound Neo-Darwinism.”
to the rule of the infirm: “Government
and exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the
world is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the
blackguards.”
(Ibid.) That is perhaps only three-quarters truth, or half-truth, and
not the whole truth.
The
world was then, as it is today, from behind the scenes of the idiocy
of political governments, ruled firmly by the rational and calculated
primacy instincts of the most brilliant Superman who continually
divine wars, and World Wars, now we are up to World War IV, as the
means of crisis creation to piece-meal remake World Order in their
own image.
In
fact, the educated man controlling the narrative as the avant-garde
in intellectual thought, not only remains a greater nuisance than the
uneducated one, he also becomes the vile propagandist by adopting
silence about truth that is to be protected from the masses. The
British novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley most insightfully
understood this about distortions fashioned by omissions and its
practical utility in influencing public
behavior. Huxley observed in the Preface of his 1931 book of fable,
Brave New World, which depicted a eugenist
dystopia controlled by ubermensch forces from behind the
scenes that the rest of society remained unaware of:
'The
greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing
something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still
greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By
simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what
Mr. Churchill calls an “iron curtain” between the masses
and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as
undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have
influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by
the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical
rebuttals.'
In
a talk given to the students at the University of California,
Berkeley, on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the
Brave New World, Aldous
Huxley observed of the very real and empirical role of these
behind the scenes forces depicted in his fable, in channeling
the public mind that is already most carefully primed by Shaw's
schoolmaster for celebrating ignorance, into complete voluntary
surrender to the Superman:
'You
can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! If you are going
to control any population for any length of time you must have some
measure of consent. It's exceedingly difficult to see how pure
terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly
long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an
element of persuasion. An element of getting
people to consent to what is happening to them. Well, it seems to me
that the nature of the Ultimate Revolution with which we are now
faced is precisely this: that we are in process of developing a whole
series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who
have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people
actually to love their servitude! This is the, it seems to me the
ultimate in malevolent revolution shall we say.'
We
see precisely that reality unfurl today. Shaw's educated childish
fools impervious to political science, and brigands and blackguards,
controlled by Huxley's oligarchic forces from behind the scenes,
attempting to persuade the public mind to accept Alice in Wonderland
absurdities as fact.
We
even observe how willingly the world public traveling
through American airports surrender themselves to grotesque
indignities in physical searches to keep them safe from Ali Baba. The
only truly global superpower in the history of earth's civilizations,
which Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1996 Mein Kampf, The Grand
Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,
characterized as: “America is not only the first, as well as
the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the
very last.” (pg. 209), has been reduced to a
police-state with virtually its own public's consent.
All
on the mere fable that Ali Baba
wielding some antediluvian and
distorted dogmas from the stone-age propagandistically titled
“militant Islam”, is a
ubiquitous threat to their well-being! Pakistan is daily bombed by
drones based on that very same fable. The world is rapidly being
reduced to a global police-state based on that same fable.
End
Excerpt
So
now we arrive at seeking understanding of the limits to knowability
of reality. What can't be objectively knowable by any mind, human or
alien, is the hard limit. The soft limit to objective knowability is
characteristically human and it can only be extended to the degree
that a human mind can naturally expand, analyze, scrutinize and
synthesize objectively, and overcome its own subjectivity,
conformity, and asininity while retaining insight and intuition.
There is a hard limit to this that is individual specific and depends
on their natural genetic makeup. In the preceding sections we have
already seen the many pernicious traps that easily ensnare the human
mind into crippled epistemology. The epistemological limit problem
was first described by this author in the case study: Why is the
Holy Qur'an so easy to hijack? Part-IV.
Begin
Excerpt
While
natural programming of the human mind may appear to be a fine point
to those unfamiliar with the making of the human mind, it is a
crucial one nevertheless. Epistemology, how we know what we know,
cannot be ignored in any learned scholarship that claims to be in
genuine pursuit of “knowing”, the discovery of what is,
without imparting any personal coloring of one's own to it. Meaning,
keeping the observer and the observed separate and non-influencing,
often impossible in social sciences where man is observing his own
species. And of course, also impossible in the Schrödinger's
cat physics paradox, of the act of observation itself disturbing
the observed, and therefore making it paradoxical to learn what was
the state of the observed before one tried observing it! Meaning, if
there is a cat in a black box, and the cat is found dead upon opening
the box, was it also dead before the box was opened, or was it only
found dead upon observation. In the human sense, since the mind that
is being used to understand the world, is part of that world itself,
there is an automatic self-referential limit to what is objectively
knowable. It is the limiting factor of epistemology whereby the
judgment of the mind not only colors what is being observed, but is
unable to objectively observe itself. It carves a self-limit for
discovering what is using the scientific method. Its well-known
processes, which basically involve four recursive steps, or stages,
any of which may be absent or combined in a given endeavor: (1)
theorizing, hypothesizing, modeling; (2) testability (of the model),
observability, reproducibility (by others); (3) measurability,
quantifiability; and (4) predictability, anticipatability (based on
the model); cannot deal with self-reference.
That
fundamental limit was discovered/proved by the twentieth century
Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher, Kurt Friedrich
Gödel, and has come to be known as Gödel's
incompleteness theorem. How far does this fundamental limit
extend from its self-referential hard limit clearly depends on the
observer. Some minds are more limited in their abilities to be
objective than others and hence encounter the limits of knowability
sooner than they need to. The ultimate knower of all things
therefore, even by its philosophical definition, the one who can
transcend this hard limit, is the one outside of the domain of all
things. That is the definition of God, both philosophically as well
as mathematically. And it is precisely that definition of God that is
also categorically expressed in the Holy Qur'an.
Only
God can be the Knower of all things. Aleem. It is no surprise that
Aleem is among the 99 names of God in the Holy Qur'an, each name
expressing a characteristic of God that can only apply to God in its
most superlative degree. Which is why postulating the existence of
God is so much easier than proving His existence --- the superlative
degrees can only apply to the one who is by definition God. Which is
why atheism that seeks only empiricism as its standard for argument
and falsification falls on its face philosophically. Agnosticism is
philosophically far more tenable and even sensible. And the super
atheist of the twentieth century, Lord Bertrand Russell, admitted it
as such in his debate with a priest in New York in 1948 that was
broadcast by the BBC (see The Existence of God – A debate
between Bertrand Russell and Father F. C. Copleston, Chapter 13, Why
I am not a Christian, Routledge), that atheism cannot be proved or
disproved, just as theism cannot be proved or disproved, and
therefore they are both similar in terms of having beliefs on either
end of the spectrum which cannot be falsified, and consequently the
more tenable state is that of agnosticism. While empiricism is
neutral towards both if we ignore existence as a self-evident proof
in itself, philosophy swings the balance on the side of theism.
Atheism is an absurdity of the one-half brained creature quite unlike
the logical Mr. Spock who would straightforwardly see the
philosophical logic of at least a philosophical God, one who can know
all things, one who is not constrained by the material laws of nature
and above it by definition. But when laws of nature is made god, then
that axiom automatically precludes the existence of a philosophical
God, and thus remains crippled philosophically by accepting the
limits to knowability. Nothing is knowable outside of the laws of
nature [natural secularism], which is limited by empiricism as its
defining epistemology.
By
definition then, accepting the limits to knowability confines
knowability, alongside the imagination to believe that something
greater than what's knowable by the mind can exist. If one accepts
such limits to existence, one can really not make any sensible or
rational statement of what one admits is beyond the realm of
existence, i.e., nothing exists outside of the laws of nature. Thus,
atheism remains crippled by absurdity as it ventures to make a
negative statement outside the limits of its own self-defined limits
to knowability. The atheist dug his own grave by making the laws of
nature his supreme god because Gödel's incompleteness theorem
provides a hard mathematical limit to perfect knowability, or perhaps
better stated, proof of perfect knowability that what is knowable
within the laws of nature is both complete and self-consistent. Since
there is nothing outside of the laws of nature as the atheist's axiom
of faith, his knowledge remains subjected to Gödel's
incompleteness theorem. Therefore with his incomplete knowledge,
he cannot deny that something does not exist for such an assertion
logically requires complete and perfect knowledge in order to
provably know what exists and what does not exist. For the theist
however, the laws of nature are but a part of creation, like all
other creation, even if the former may appear to be mechanistically
governing the inner workings of the rest of creation. And thus,
philosophically at least, there can exist one who can know beyond the
laws of nature by being outside of the creation that is governed by
the laws of nature! It violates no principle of logic to imagine it
and is self-consistent with its own axiom of faith of theism. Ergo,
God! An entity that is not governed by the laws of nature by
definition, but who created the laws of nature as God, and transcends
His own creation.
To
Mr. Spock's fascination, the Holy Qur'an introduced man to just such
a philosophically adjudicated God, self-consistent with the
mathematical idea that in order to have perfect knowledge of a
system, one must exist outside of it, and beyond it, and if one
postulates that it is possible to have perfect knowledge of the
system that is governed by the laws of nature, then one is also
compelled to postulate God who must exist outside of that system. It
is only logical. And conversely, in order to deny that God exists,
one must also deny that perfect knowledge can exist, and then one is
caught in one's own inconsistency trap for one cannot assert
something does not exist if one accepts that perfect knowledge does
not exist. For only perfect knowledge can provably claim what does
and does not exist! Q.E.D.
Atheists
who by definition claim absolute knowledge by asserting the negative,
die by the hand of reductio ad absurdum. Which is why Bertrand
Russell, as the philosopher-mathematician who understood logic, was
way smarter than his modern progeny to quickly squirrel out of that
charge of atheism by claiming agnosticism. And he did so in the very
second sentence uttered by him in that debate with Father F. C.
Copleston! For the sensible types who accept hard limits to knowledge
amenable to both logic and the human mind and who don't make absurd
claims beyond its logical purview, there is natural limits to perfect
knowing. This has direct implications for epistemology and assertive
axioms of faith which are its consequent; statements that cannot be
proved to be true and are simply assumed to be true by faith alone
because they might appear sensible, obvious, appeal to the heart or
mind, or for convenience. The entire Euclidean Geometry is built upon
such an axiom of faith for instance, that parallel lines don't meet
at infinity! No one can prove this axiom to be true but it is both
convenient and sensible under the assumption of non-relativistic
physics in everyday existence.
Now
that we better understand the unconquerable hard limits to knowing,
to objective study, to absolute knowledge, that man is not God, and
also understand the role of axioms in epistemology, it is easier to
accept even the softer but somewhat more conquerable limits to
knowing that are the consequent of our very nature of being a
socialized species which defines our worldview from birth. It
outlines and confines our “system” of existence so to
speak. This human system has its own set of axioms, its
presuppositions of faith, values, and beliefs that become ingrained
into cultures and civilizations and which are taught to its every new
generation born as “truths”. This natural human process
of socialization and cultural memory creates a self-perpetuating
system of subjectivity, and of myths that come to govern even the
minutest details of daily lives spanning the gamut of existence from
behavior to beliefs.
Even
if there was no deliberate social engineering to make the public mind
in calculated directions, the nature of human societies by definition
creates social control that is beholden not always to a group of
people, but to shared memory, shared habits, shared ethos, all of
which drive the social norms and values, and consequently both
individual and collective behavior. In other words, to be part of
society is to be part of some behavior and belief control system by
definition. To get an accurate and more objective knowledge of our
own “system”, we have to extract ourselves from the
confines of our worldviews and baseless presuppositions, and rise
above them. The truth of this statement is most assuredly beyond
doubt. It is in fact self-evident. No reasonable person can deny its
commonsense even from their own daily experience of life. The
uncomfortable fact that the subconscious human tendency towards a
priori conclusions and predisposition, despite all earnest
protestations of due diligence in having no presuppositions, appears
to be the inherent nature of socialization bias, and of the
subjectivity therein, and of the religiosity and self-righteousness
conferred to one's socialized perspective, makes it hard to transcend
our ingrained worldviews. Recall from the text in Part-II that the
left and right half brains are abstractions of the logic and
intuition functions of the mind loosely mapped to the brain geography
and not necessarily a hard physical demarcation. Logic and rational
reasoning abilities of the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) dominated
left-half brain is quite unable to penetrate that socialization
shield of soft bias subconsciously built up by the EQ (Emotional
Quotient) dominated right-half brain. The latter evidently cocoons,
or at least interferes with, the left-half's logic function of the
mind in as yet unquantifiable but still visibly undeniable ways.
This
visibility of their being separate functional entities that directly
affect the understanding of reality is easily seen in the marked
contrast between the characters of Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk in the
Star Trek fable explored in Part-II. It is mentioned here only as a
reminder of the full context of how the non-logic subjective mind can
both help and hinder the objective logic mind. The only effective
antidote to overcome the hindrance aspect which cripples human
epistemology and the consequent understanding of reality, is
increasing self-awareness. One must rationally attempt to compensate
for all the accumulated filters of years of socialization biases by
new cognitive filters that can negate their distortion effects of
subjectivity. Know thy self to know the world! In electrical
engineering parlance, it's like having compensation filters in the
signal processing path to improve its signal to noise ratio –
an analogy more apt for social sciences than may first be apparent to
the un-initiated. Think of tuning an AM radio signal. It uses a tuned
LC circuit to reject the noise and extract and amplify the broadcast
signal. Un crippled epistemology in the social sciences as well as in
physical sciences that purports to understand and know reality the
way it is, shares this common characteristic --- the requirement to
remove the layers of noise first in order to even receive the signal.
Its accurate detection, extraction, decoding, verification of correct
decoding, and making sense comes much later. History is exactly like
that --- wrapped in accumulated layers of generations of socialized
noise and willful as well as subconscious self-interests. The
narratives that survive do so either by rulers' sanctions, or by oral
history that is passed from generation to generation until it gets
penned when the new rulers permit it. What is the signal? It needs
that basic AM radio tuned circuit abstraction for detection,
extraction, and making sense!
This
is perhaps why the Holy Qur'an, while accepting socialization as a
human fact of God's own Creation, has also laid such categorical
emphasis on striving for “haq” (knowing reality, truth,
justice, calling a spade a spade even against one's own self) under
all conditions, for everyone among mankind, whereby, striving for
overcoming one's “nafs”, the personal inclination and
whim due to natural bent of mind, proclivity, socialization,
predisposition, self-interests, and desires and fears (both conscious
and subconscious), is termed the greater jihad and is made a hard
co-requisite to the reflective study of the Holy Qur'an (for instance
see Surah Al-Waqia, 56:78-79: “In a Book well-guarded, Which
none shall touch but those who are clean (purified)”).
This
is also why the sensible first order model of a cryptogram ciphertext
from which the plaintext message needs to be accurately extracted,
with graduated access control to its meaning based on shedding all
biases as precondition, developed in this study is the most apt model
for logically deciphering the message contained in this most unique
Book of all books. Without this perceptive model that lends some
measure of objectivity to the study of the Holy Qur'an, socialization
bias virtually determines its entire meaning for both an individual
and his society. That exercise of socialization, for the lack of a
more sanitizing description, lays the first foundation of
indoctrinating systems to control public behavior. For religion to
have any philosophical significance beyond man-made as a method of
social control, and beyond personal as a method of self-catharsis and
self-gratification, meaning, for religion to be viewed as being of
Divine origin and Divine purpose as the Divine Guidance from a
Transcendental Source rather than of human origin, accurately
deciphering its specification irrespective of the observer, mandates
such a rational model for understanding it.
The
fact that virtually zero understanding of this aspect of social
science is betrayed by any notable Muslim scholar that has passed by
this scribe's slovenly gaze over the years of his study, bespeaks of
the moribund state of intellectual thought in Muslim scholarship
which has progressively only degenerated into incestuously
self-reinforced dogmas and doctrines that find scant support in the
Determinates of the Holy Qur'an.
The
proof of that pudding is in its eating. It is self-evident by just
looking at the state of Muslims and at the state of the enemies of
Muslims – both are driven almost exclusively by their
respective socialized predisposition instead of what the Good Book
itself says. The same text is interpreted by them based on their own
narrow socialization bias when subconscious, and pathetic
self-interests when conscious. The staunchest enemies of the Muslims,
the Jews, are driven exclusively by their blind hatred of Prophet
Muhammad and Islam, just as they are driven by their blind hatred of
Christ and Christianity – although the two are today cozy bed
fellows of strange mutual convenience with the Jew wagging the goy in
their combined onslaught against Islam and Muslims – and both
enemies of Muslims exaggerate and amplify their hatred along their
respective narrow socialization biases in about the same measure as
the Shia and Sunni Muslims are each driven by their blind love of
Prophet Muhammad and Islam, while differing in their respective
understanding exactly along their own narrow socialization biases.
Qualitatively, to the observant student of sociology at least, one
who has succeeded in distancing himself to some measure from what he
is observing, these are different manifestations of the same primary
phenomena: socialization under crippled epistemology. It yields a
plentiful harvest of useful idiots for Machiavelli and Übermensch.
The
Case Study in Mantra Creation in the report on The Mighty Wurlitzer
explains how the socialization biases and cultural memories of the
unwary public are cunningly harvested for their own perception
management. Specific attention is paid to the works of Edward Bernays
and political psychologists referenced therein --- a social science
field that appears to be entirely foreign to the Muslim intellect.
That unsophisticated public mind, Muslim and non Muslim alike, is
easy picking for the diabolical Western hegemons who have today
penetrated not just psychology and behavior control, but are rapidly
moving towards full spectrum human control. See Zbigniew Brzezinski's
presaging in Between Two Ages, Aldous Huxley's dystopic fable: Brave
New World, and Aldous Huxley's talk at the University of California,
Berkeley, titled The Ultimate Revolution, March 20, 1962, all fully
referenced and examined in The Mighty Wurlitzer, ibid., to realize
how little independence of thought even an intellectual really
exercises upon his own mind today.
The
trifecta of the forces of nature, nurture, and perception managers
all conspire to extract obedience and conformity from the human mind.
The truly independent mind may exist only in philosophy, in fables,
and as an abstraction. It arguably cannot exist in socialized man.
Especially when he is compelled to “United We Stand”.
Self-serving forces of co-option and cognitive dissonance ensure that
outcome, often subconsciously when one is not an outright mercenary
or superman. This complex reality directly colors the acquisition of
knowledge, and the subsequent expression of knowledge. Especially for
studying the untermensch, the lesser peoples, meaning others
different from us, their belief systems, their value systems, their
histories, their literatures, and their civilizations whence one
man's treasures become another man's trash.
A
telling quote from Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay of the British
Empire, speaking to the British Parliament to redefine the Indian
subcontinent's education policy under British colonial rule, captures
the veritable truth of these words which have universal import for
the pursuit of all social sciences:
“I
have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what
I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read
translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have
conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their
proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the
oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I
have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of
a good European library was worth the whole native literature of
India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature
is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who
support the oriental plan of education.” --- Minute on Indian
Education, Minute by the Hon'ble T. B. Macaulay, dated the 2nd
February 1835
While
the aforementioned example is one of shocking denigration from a
colonizing power flushed with the hubris of imperialism and suffering
from the superiority complex of all conquerors, the same
qualitatively applies in converse as well, when one is
hagiographically studying one's own civilization, literature,
history, or religion, and gloats as Macaulay does in the above
example. Also when one is suffering from an abject inferiority
complex as the colonized and enslaved people and studying the ruling
class whereby everything that is one's own is deemed inferior and
unworthy. It is often accompanied by a mad rush to adopt everything
foreign, from ideas, language, and solutions to objects, lifestyles,
and amenities.
The
first step towards objectivity therefore, on any subject, is none
other than becoming aware of one's own innate subjectivity, and its
immersion in crippled epistemology, and confronting it head on.
Everything else just follows from it.
No
sensible person can deny the truth of these words for the matter is
self-evident. Except perhaps when applying to one self. This scribe
has yet to meet a person, from the man of cloth to the man of
science, arts, humanities, or letters, who believes he is anything
but objective! That is the tragedy of man from time immemorial;
living and dying self-righteously off of a crippled epistemology!
Which is why this scribe calls this age the Age of Jahiliya. It is an
age from which self-awareness has been most cunningly stripped off
and substituted with, as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in Between Two
Ages, “narrow-gauged specialists or superficial generalists”.
This makes for a perfect golden age for the Machiavellian scientific
controllers behind the scenes as depicted in Plato's Allegory of the
Cave. The age, and the methods of human behavior control in that age,
go hand in hand:
“In
the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the
individual support of millions of unorganized citizens, who are
easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, and
effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to
manipulate emotions and control reason.
Reliance
on television—and hence the tendency to replace language with
imagery, which is international rather than national, and to include
war coverage or scenes of hunger in places as distant as, for
example, India—creates a somewhat more cosmopolitan, though
highly impressionistic, involvement in global affairs.” ---
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970, pg. 11
The
possibilities of scientific human control in the technetronic society
is also examined in great depth in Bertrand Russell's Impact of
Science on Society, 1952, where the British Fabian philosopher of the
oligarchic ruling class made the argument for absolute control of the
masses finally being made possible in the modern scientific era. It
was the same wine in a new bottle which was corked by Zbigniew
Brzezinski for the same oligarchy in Between Two Ages some two
decades later. The British philosopher observed that global
scientific control in a world police-state is the only effective way
for a stable society to exist in which all the undesirable useless
eaters have been population controlled like game on a natural
preserve, and the preferred races, mainly the European white man,
given unlimited liberty to procreate their superior progeny at will.
Russell's purpose being the same as Brzezinski's, Huxley's, Wells',
and many others going all the way back to Plato. While the latter was
warning the public against the Übermensch social engineers with
the best of intent to have noble men become their wise shepherd as
the philosopher-king, others arguably presaged the techniques of mind
manipulation and behavior control as a self-serving self-fulfilling
prophecy for the Social Darwinian Übermensch continuing as their
natural shepherd in the scientific era just as he has been from time
immemorial with more primitive techniques:
“There
is, it must be confessed, a psychological difficulty about a single
world government. The chief source of social cohesion in the past, I
repeat, has been war: the passions that inspire feeling of unity are
hate and fear. These depend upon the existence of an enemy, actual or
potential. It seems to follow that a world government could only be
kept in being by force, not by the spontaneous loyalty that now
inspires a nation at war.” --- Bertrand Russell, Impact of
Science on Society, 1952, Chapter 2, General Effects of Scientific
Technique, pg 37
As
one can easily see, these dystopic forces of social engineering have
direct implications for the creation, promulgation and acquisition of
knowledge; for both suppression of accurate knowledge, and for making
it difficult to acquire the pertinent facts and analysis in a timely
manner when its widespread public disclosure can prevent a fait
accompli. Control of knowledge, of reporting of events of history and
current affairs, and of the perceptive understanding of these
matters, is the cornerstone of controlling humanity. Control,
control, control, is the mantra of the superman in every era --- Why?
Because he claims to know best because of his higher intelligence,
greater wealth, or the privilege of being closer to God, if not god
himself. Aldous Huxley warned of the grotesque reality of that style
of social control for inducing voluntary servitude, and the arrival
of the scientific era which is enabling this brave new world
of engineered social control at an accelerated pace. Huxley called it
the era of the Ultimate Revolution in social control, an era in which
people can be made to love their servitude:
'You
can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! If you are going
to control any population for any length of time you must have some
measure of consent. It's exceedingly difficult to see how pure
terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly
long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an
element of persuasion. An element of getting people to consent to
what is happening to them.
Well,
it seems to me that the nature of the Ultimate Revolution with which
we are now faced is precisely this: that we are in process of
developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the
controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably always
will exist, to get people actually to love their servitude!
This
is the, it seems to me the ultimate in malevolent revolution shall we
say.' --- Aldous Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution, speech at the
University of California, Berkeley, March 20, 1962, minute 04:06
Overcoming
such dystopic forces of social engineering requires overcoming the
reality captured by Brzezinski, of the macro economics of nations and
the rapid pace of scientific development fashioning “narrow-gauged
specialists or superficial generalists” who are content to
labor hard all day long, and loving it.
This
counter exercise to perverse social control requires a great deal of
societal transformation in who wields its power, an exercise which is
nothing short of revolutionary, the least of which, to begin its
public demand, is the public:
–– acquiring
a perceptive understanding of power and its role in the making of the
human mind;
–– acquiring
wherewithal of social forces by not merely training to become
blind-folded economic widgets chasing the “American Dream”;
–– acquiring
knowledge that leads to better understanding of reality and the
forces that have shaped it, and continue to shape it;
–– and
consequently, requiring the expenditure of a great deal of mental and
physical personal energy despite the needs of the stomach and career
and for which there may not be any immediately gratifying pot of gold
waiting at the end of the rainbow.
A
tall order to think important, let alone to pursue, in an age that is
by design engineered to fashion only “a large number of men who
are content to labor hard all day long”:
'The
economic well-being of the nation depends on the presence of a large
number of men who are content to labor hard all day long. Because men
are naturally lazy they will not work unless forced by necessity to
do so.' --- Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1705
These
are all the very real forces behind the man-made soft limits to
knowledge, difficult to overcome, but not impossible to overcome.
Nevertheless, it is also not so straightforward to overcome either
because in the age of universal deceit, to discover the truth is a
revolutionary act!! The levels of co-option hiding in the dark
recesses of the human mind, and in the human stomach, are not
separated from the pursuit of this revolutionary act. And it all
hinges upon the Qur'anic prescription of “jihad-un-nafs”
– waging an epic battle against the self to extract oneself
from the throes of crippled epistemology including self-deceit and
self-interest – the first principle from which all truth shines
through its protective layers.
Now
we understand the full dimensions of the many impediments to both
acquiring knowledge of reality the way it actually is, past and
present, and using that knowledge productively rather than just for
amusing ourselves when we do dare to seek it forthrightly.
End
Excerpt
Philosophical
God vs. Religion's God
As
uncovered in the preceding section, the forensic attitude of a
reasonable rational mind (as opposed to the dogmatic mind of the
Richard Dawkins variety, the Dawkinsian clan) towards
epistemology, has quite logically led to the believable hypothesis of
a philosophical God. The same attitude can also help answer the age
old question of whether or not Divine Revelation exists, or can
exist, or is it merely figment of prophetic imagination, its
originating source being the mind itself and which cannot exist from
external transcendental source.
The
Deist philosophers, after the compromise of separation of Church and
Science in the seventeenth century – whereby the Church agreed
to not interfere in the purview of science if men of science stopped
making claims in the purview of the men of Church – had stopped
at the threshold of philosophical God. The deists believed that there
is a Creator of the Universe, the God of Nature, but did not believe
in metaphysical notions of God of Nature being involved in the
affairs of man, including through Divine Revelation; metaphysics was
the Church's purview. It is said by historians that the founders of
the New World, the United States of America, were deists in their
almost secular theological dispensation. Which is why the Declaration
of Independence signed by them references in the first opening
sentence, both “Laws of Nature and
of Nature's God”, and not religion's God, not
even Christianity's, despite their being of that cultural background
--- the founders evidently had supped enough from the gods of
religion from which they were declaring their final separation: “When
in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to
dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,
and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal
station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,
a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should
declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
As
we have already gleaned from the discussion of Secular Naturalism,
and we shall revisit it again in this section later when the need
arises, the founders crafted their notion of “equal station”
in their New World in full accordance with the “Laws of
Nature”. The New World was to be a safe haven for men of all
religions, and no religion, but mainly the persecuted colonists
escaping Europe, many of whom were iconoclasts of their time, and not
the indigenous peoples and Negro slaves the colonists had brought to
the New World to power their cotton industry. For those of “equal
station” however, it was not to be the business of the new
state to dictate in matters of faith; and thus came the separation of
Church and State by appeal to the God of Nature, and not God of
Religion!
That
separation, which had come on the heels of the separation of Church
and Science in Europe, was due to a political dispensation learnt
from the experiences of the Dark Ages that had engulfed the European
continent under the divine power of the Church, and against
which polymaths of reason and philosophy had rebelled; and not
because the men of science had discovered that the nature of the
universe or the laws of nature itself called for that separation.
Not
sufficient was known about the laws of nature then, nor is it known
now, to dogmatically declare that everything is understood about how
the universe works, and its basis is entirely materialism. That
forced separation of convenience however, led to making the
gratuitous presupposition which subsequently became codified in the
epistemology of science as well as the philosophy of science, that
only materialistic existence was real, the rest was the business of
the Church. Only materialistic Nature and its physicality could be
reasoned about, observed, measured, quantified, theorized, and
hypotheses confirmed or refuted in experimentation and not just by
philosophical arguments. The Greek philosophers had been notorious in
their lack of experimentation; they had concentrated mainly on
philosophical reasoning and logic as their principal method of
understanding reality. Empiricism obviously bettered that method.
Thus
modern science and its empirical scientific method was born; the
inheritor of both the Hellenic civilization of antiquity, and Muslim
civilization that had re-lighted and passed on the Hellenic torch of
learning to the new West to spur its Renaissance. Its principal axiom
however was still the dogmatic separation that Church and Science had
agreed upon under duress from each other, and which removed from the
ambit of science not just all non physicality, but also all
metaphysical and teleological questions (along with the superstitious
nonsense of course): the Aristotelian final-cause.
Materialist
conception of Nature, the only philosophy of science acceptable to
the Church fearing their own loss of power and reluctantly agreeing
to grant concession to the primacy of science as the way to
understand the physical world, became purposeless once the
metaphysical domain was ab initio removed from the purview of
science. Only Church could seek to answer the “why”
questions, not science, and only Church could opine on the
non-material aspects of the universe. That reactionary legacy of
compromise with the powerful Church which continued to hound
iconoclastic men of reason in the seventeenth through the nineteenth
centuries despite the half way to three-quarter way into the
Renaissance spur, continues to dog the fundamental paradigm of
science to this very day in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately,
it is no longer remembered by the Young Naturalist scientists and
philosophers how we got here since the axioms of separation due to
the seventeenth century dysfunction have become sanctified into
sacred “truths” of modern science.
With
that brief overview of how we got to the modern sacred dogmas of both
materialist reason and materialist science, the combined contribution
of deists and atheists who desired separation from the dogmaticism of
the Church, we return to the foundational question that divides
theism from atheism. If the philosophical God is logical, why isn't
Divine Revelation? While the former is abstract, the latter is
concrete --- for it is a claim made by existent Scripture(s) that can
now be falsified. The preceding section enables us to get a more
objective (and less dogmatic) handle on this question than is
possible without the perceptive understanding of epistemology and how
its presuppositions determine process outcomes. Now, the source which
makes the claim to Divine Origin, whether a Book or claim to
Prophethood, instead of outright rejection based on the materialistic
dogma, can be put under objective forensic scrutiny to decipher what
precisely is it saying in its core guidance principles and does its
religion fit the philosophical God; independent of the observer
making the scrutiny, and using only philosophical truths as the first
order criterion for adjudication.
Let's
quickly review how we arrived at the philosophical God in the
preceding section before we delve into the question of Divine
Revelation. It is, after all, an intense dose of high potency
intellectual vitamins and reminding ourselves of its logic is
necessary for full absorption. In order to accept or reject the
reasoning, one must be clear as to what precisely it is. If we have
understood the concept that Divine Revelation implies a
Transcendental Source, let's just abstractly call that God for the
lack of a more familiar term, then we can look for evidence in the
Prophetic Text of God being its Author, or man being its author, to
confirm or deny that hypothesis of Divine Revelation by first
understanding what is meant by that word God. We have already seen
the philosophical God arising both mathematically and philosophically
in the above discussion --- as the consequence of Gödel's
incompleteness theorem. An entity that must be above all else in
order to have complete and self-consistent knowledge of that below it
(mathematical necessity); the Creator of all things except itself,
not bound by the laws that govern its creations and consequently
having perfect knowledge of its creations that is both complete and
self-consistent; it itself being complete and self-consistent
(philosophical necessity because there is nothing else above it and
the premise of perfect knowledge demands that it terminate on God)
with perfect knowledge of itself as well all its creations. This is
philosophical God.
If
we accept that philosophical definition of God on the premise that
perfect knowledge can exist, and we have seen in the preceding
discussion that it can only exist in the philosophical God as the
consequence of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, then we
have the opportunity to examine the hypothesis of Divine Revelation
and compare against the definition of philosophical God. By that
philosophical definition, God cannot Author a Divine Guidance for its
creation, namely, human beings, that is inconsistent, or incomplete
for the purpose that it is created, especially when it itself claims
to be both perfect and complete Guidance as the Holy Qur'an does, the
only Divine Text in existence today that claims to be the direct
Words of God (and not merely “inspired words” as claimed
for the New Testament of the Bible by its adherents): “This
day have I perfected for you your religion and completed My favor on
you and chosen for you Islam as a religion;” (verse
5:3). Or, obviously, the hypothesis of it being from the
philosophical God is naturally falsified. In the case of the religion
of Islam, this falsification criterion is the strongest among all
contenders to Divine Revelation because of this categorical claim
made by its Scripture, the Holy Qur'an. Other scriptures can also be
falsified on the same basis even though none of them claim to be the
direct word of God. But their absolutist principles are deemed to be
from God and can thus stand falsification.
It
cannot be the philosophical God's work if it hides fallacies,
absurdities, inconsistencies (due to self-consistency requirement of
perfect knowledge), or is incomplete (due to completeness requirement
of perfect knowledge), or is inaccurate (due to perfection
requirement of perfect knowledge). This is a rational and fairly
objective logical criterion for falsifying the hypothesis of the
philosophical God being the Author of any claim to Divine Revelation.
And
any God that is less than the philosophical God, cannot really be God
– the Creator of all Existence in Nature and Itself beyond it.
Hence
all conceptions of God must minimally satisfy the philosophical God
condition that is the direct consequence of Gödel's
incompleteness theorem. And the philosophical idea of what that
entity would be if it had complete and self-consistent knowledge of
the highest order system, namely that of all existence in nature.
Other attributes that are generally applied to God are religion
specific and nothing to do with the philosophical God. These include
beliefs about God such as God being Most Beneficent, Most Merciful,
Most Just, etc. etc. etc. Religion and its scripture give these
attributes to God and these are unfalsifiable beliefs. When one
accepts a religion on faith, one also accepts these attributes of God
on faith, just like one accepts Afterlife, Day of Judgment,
Heaven and Hell, etc. Thus, while Muslims believe in Islam as the
Divine Revelation and its conception of God includes those
aforementioned attributes and beliefs, the ancient Greeks accepted
the plethora of their own mythological gods like Zeus et al. who, as
their mythologies depicted, were unjust, fickle minded, selfish,
jealous, tempestuous, and played their heavenly power-games amongst
each other using the earthly humans as their proxies. If a divine
scripture is claimed to be Divine Revelation from God, the Word of
God (or the underlying principles being from God), then it must minimally satisfy the
condition of the philosophical God, complete and self-consistent, or
the hypothesis is trivially falsified.
This
is of course only the rational and reasonable Rejection
Criterion for the divine hypothesis. The question
however remains: is it also a rational and reasonable Acceptance
Criterion when the hypothesis cannot be falsified by
the Rejection Criterion?
For
even the most objective human mind --- that latter question must
still ultimately reduce to the response from the non-quantifiable
capacity of his right half brain, intuition and insight, after the
left half brain has done its job of filtering out the chaff from the
wheat in accordance with its logic and reasoning capacity. This is a
rational utilization of the whole mind whereby both reason and
intuition are permitted to play their symbiotic role to reach a human
conclusion (as opposed to solely the materialist's conception of
reason that denies intuition as a valid source of understanding
reality unless it can be reduced to some kind of empirical
physicality). It is also why, although belief in a philosophical God
is based entirely on reasonable exercise of logic and reason, belief
in a religion, usually the one in which one is socialized, is often
based on emotional and spiritual exercise, its appeal to the heart
--- like falling in love. The distinction among emotional attachments
due to 1) socialization (or indoctrination) vs 2) emotional
attachment due to spiritual enlightenment and faith (including love)
vs 3) emotional attachment due to capacity to appreciate what cannot
be captured in materialistic and Darwinian philosophies such as
appreciation of beauty (and all that which it synthesizes such as
beautiful music, art, poetry), appreciation of the profound (and all
that which it synthesizes such as philosophy, theology,
spirituality), etc., cannot be easily made. It is also not clear cut
between the preceding three cases of belief through exercising the
predominant right-half non-logical intuitive mind and 4), that
egalitarian condition of the rational human mind in which the
left-half logic mind has reasoned through the Rejection
Criterion and not rejected it, and intuition / faith
of the right-half mind have made the final judgment call on the
Acceptance Criterion and
accepted the exact same belief.
But
observe that in this latter case, faith in a non materialist belief /
hypothesis / non-physicality is not irrational nor whimsical because
reason and philosophy, the best tools for separating chaff from wheat
available to the rational mind, have exhausted their purview and if
not accepted the proposition by weight of evidence, have also not
been able to reject it as an absurdity.
For
what is obviously beyond the bounds of physical materialism and thus
beyond the purview of the scientific method, employing reason
and self-evident philosophical truths is the rational approach of a
non-dogmatic intellect; one not plagued by materialist presumptions
of reductionist empiricism being the sole determinant of all
existence. It is because of this lack of wisdom and dogged
unreasonableness that all non-physicality appear equally specious in
materialism's reductionist dogma which fail to distinguish among them
(but its subscribers too, when it suits them, also go by faith or
trust in authority figures without any empirical evidence, as the
scientific world did when none rejected Nobel laureate physicist
Richard Feynman's word for his own Out of Body Experiences in
a sensory deprivation tank as valid experiences of reality, even
though no one else could reproduce it).
That's
because these human experiences are all interconnected and
interrelated, and to make any clear cut among them is impossible.
One's treasures in these matters cannot necessarily be proved to
others because the final say must come down to what is often
intensely subjective and personal --- human intuition, human
insights, human feelings, the cornerstone of faith, as well as
families, communities, cultures, and civilizations that share common
bonds and values. To ignore these innate human traits as both sources
of understanding of reality, as well as human necessity to
progressively advance as fuller human beings in one's own life (from
meeting materialistic and physical needs to meeting higher order
spiritual needs, like from satiating reproduction needs and hunger to
seeking companionship, to seeking meaning in life, to living the
highest moral ideals, to reaching the pinnacle of man's existence),
is to ignore substantial aspects of what truly makes us unique as
human beings. Otherwise, modern sociobiology and socioneurology
reveal that we are not that much different from advanced primates in
our most existential functions, including what was previously deemed
to be exclusively human, such as empathy, stress, revenge, group
violence. It is also to willfully ignore how epistemology is crippled
by gratuitous presuppositions and dogmas, further strengthening the
foundations of human ignorance. This applies as much to the physical
as to metaphysical.
The
gratuitous presupposition of the naturalists at hand, that Divine
Revelation cannot exist when a) reason alone can rather rationally
lead to the hypothesis of a philosophical God as demonstrated above,
and b) existence of Scriptures which claim to guide mankind towards
moral ideals and which can be subjected to rational criterions to
separate absurdities from meaningful truths, is just that, a dogmatic
presumption born of their pseudo religious belief that all that
exists in the natural order are through forces which can be reduced
to physicality and mathematicized.
Without
getting needlessly polemical, and holding steadfastly on to logic and
reason as the yardstick to penetrate into the heart of the matter
that motivates this discussion, regardless of where moral truths such
as the Golden Rule mentioned previously first originated from, or
which scriptures these are found in today (whether in Solon's ancient
dispensation of law, or Confucius's ancient edicts, or the Bible both
Old and New Testament, or the teachings of the Holy Qur'an, etc.),
now that mankind has these moral truths in their possession, and many
more like these, we can sure implement them --- And that too hasn't
happened in the recorded history of mankind. Nor is it ever likely to
see the light of day in the future. Because primacy is as strong a
natural instinct in man as hunger. And it is easily facilitated by
secular naturalism.
It
is only the mankind's religions, held sacred in their respective
scriptures, in collective memories of its respective adherents, and
in rituals which continually remind mankind of these absolutist moral
truths as emanating from an absolutist source and therefore not
subject to man's expediencies in changing them when suited; which
continually harken mankind to implement them; and which continually
harken mankind to sever their bonds of servitude to the wolves among
them. These truths continue to inspire people, if not always in
practice, then at least in their minds as the ideals to live by. And
perhaps some day these ideals may indeed transform man, but only when
these moral guidance succeed in lighting the proverbial fire in the
mind of man as categorical imperatives and not rituals to plan for
Afterlife and to soothe the troubled conscience. Religion plays an
enriching role in man's life which simply cannot be extirpated by the
Descartesians. It can of course be cleansed off of its
superstitions and absurdities, reformed off cultural intrusions and
bold impudences of the mind of man, but not eliminated from the life
of man. For, something else, something perverse, something that suits
the wolves and the primacy instincts of man, shall quickly fill that
void.
None
other than prominent scientists with lasting contributions to science
have arrived at the holistic conclusion that there can be no clear
cut between materialistic reductionism and non-physicality that is
precious and enriching to man. Here is world's foremost physicist of
the last century, German theoretical physicist Max Planck whose work
on quantum theory won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918,
offering his sage counsel to the one-track world of Dawkinsian
scientific materialism:
“Modern
physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each
part by itself, since such a method often implies the loss of
important properties of the system. We must keep our attention fixed
on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. ... The
same is true of our intellectual life. It is
impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion and art. The
whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.”
--- Max Planck
The
best scientists in the world, those not narrowly and overly
specialized, well understand the role subjective imagination and
intuition (i.e., what appears as faith to others) plays in one's
rational scientific pursuits. As Charles Townes, 1964 Nobel physics
laureate, stated it:
“Science
wants to know the mechanism of the universe, religion the meaning.
The two cannot be separated. Many scientists feel there is no place
in research for discussion of anything that sounds mystical. But
it is unreasonable to think we already know enough about the natural
world to be confident about the totality of forces.”
The
Muslim scientist Abdus Salam, who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in
Physics with (Jewish atheist) Steven Weinberg and (Christian) Sheldon
Lee Glashow "for their contributions to the theory of the
unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary
particles", noted the role of faith in the grander discoveries
of physics by first reciting verses 67:3-4 of Surah Al-Mulk from the
Holy Qur'an at the Nobel podium in Stockholm during his Banquet
Speech on December 10, 1979:
“Thou
seest not, in the creation of the All-merciful any imperfection,
Return thy gaze, seest thou any fissure. Then Return thy gaze, again
and again. Thy gaze, Comes back to thee dazzled, aweary.”
--- Holy Qur'an, verses 67:3-4
And
then stated:
“This
in effect is, the faith of all physicists; the deeper we seek, the
more is our wonder excited, the more is the dazzlement for our gaze.”
Arthur
Leonard Schawlow, 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on lasers,
observed:
“It
seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the
universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible
answers are religious. ... I find a need for God in the universe and
in my own life.”
Even
modern philosophers of the twenty-first century have begun to feel
the gratuitous imposition of the Dawkinsian clan led dogma of
scientific materialism prevalent in our own century which denies
animism completely, especially in relation to Revelation and Prophecy
that underwrite world religions.
This
is Charles Taliaferro, American professor of philosophy at St. Olaf
College, in his interview to Tehran Times published January 7, 2016:
“As
a philosopher I believe that such skepticism about the historical
Jesus and Muhammad is based on philosophical assumptions of secular
naturalism which presupposes by definition that prophecy and
revelation is impossible, an assumption that, in my view, is
unjustified.”
The
battle between the two antipodes on the validity of Divine Revelation
is mainly one of dogmatic presupposition leading to crippled
epistemology. But as we have also witnessed in the preceding
discussion, that crippled epistemology is also easily rectified when
dogma is subtracted from its ambit and its various aspects
scrutinized forensically for what they are without prejudice.
It
is also important to not overlook the obvious caveats that accompany
this forensic exercise on a theological matter that transcends the
bounds of material empiricism. Since this exercise of adjudicating
upon a speech that is hypothesized as emanating from the
philosophical God (our falsifiable axiom) that is both perfectly
self-consistent and perfectly complete, by even the most rational of
human minds that is neither, makes the exercise vulnerable to both
Type 1 and Type 2 errors defined in
statistics to validate hypothesis, as respectively: false
positives (it is not speech of God but is incorrectly
accepted as such due to incomplete or misapplied criterion), and
false negatives (it is indeed speech of God but is
incorrectly rejected due to incomplete or misapplied criterion).
Once
again, the innate human dimension in epistemology simply cannot be
ignored. It leads to greater reliance on intuition and insight –
does the proposition sound right, does it appeal to the heart, even
if impersonal logic or misanthropic reason may argue otherwise. For
instance, reason might dictate to the utilitarian mind to kill granny
and handicapped children once they become a social or family burden,
but the heart rejects it outright --- and heart prevails unless
forced by power. In Impact of Science on Society for example,
Bertrand Russell, the father of twentieth century postmodernist
atheism, offered his highest reasoning to rationalize a global
dystopic police state for humanity as the most stable mechanism for
governing a global scientific society, that there “would now
be no technical difficulty about a single world-wide Empire”,
“a world government” which “could only be
kept in being by force”. No free human being can agree to
live in a global prison-state just because the primacy reasoning of
uber rationalists lead them to preach to the sheep that a world government
managed as a global police-state is the most “stable”
method of governance of a scientific society in the greater public interest.
Faith
is exactly like that after all the rational scrutinizing criterions
are exhausted by the rational portion of the mind. Faith appears to
be innate in man. The drive for faith appears to be unlearned, like
the drive for reproduction. It has persisted since time immemorial,
and cannot be separated from man's existence anymore than the natural
drive for reproduction can. It can, however, be replaced with crafty
dogmas and false beliefs just as easily as in the past faith was
dominated by specious dogmas and superstitions to create false
intuitions. Faith appears to be like a natural and innate container
in man – varying in size for each human being based on their
natural makeup like any other human trait (such as IQ or athleticism
or sense of beauty, etceteras) – pour anything into it. When
the Divine spark springs in it, it can move mountains. When garbage
is poured into it, it creates enslavement.
And
now we also begin to perceptively appreciate why it is necessary to
remove faith in the Divine from people's lives with the drive towards
atheistic world Secular Humanism (previously it was with the drive
towards world Communism) and Newspeak (saying one thing and
meaning quite another) and Doublethink (accepting or
promulgating conflicting facts and ideas). Subtraction of God from
people's lives under whichever pretext, makes it easier to control
them; to standardize and organize the populations in functional
units; and to easily foist the worst dystopia upon them in which
people just learn to love their own servitude. Goethe had captured
that existence: “None are more
hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The
truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule
them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like
right in their eyes.” It enables the sheep to
perform their daily routines in blissful contentment, never acquiring
the motivation, nor the inspiration, to rebel against their despotic
shepherds; the wolves who feed off of their blood. The uncanny power
of God in people's lives as a counter force to be reckoned with, is
so well understood by shepherds who are the masters of social
engineering, and have been so from time immemorial, that even modern
fables have depicted the power of faith in liberating awakened slaves
from the worst dystopia – dystopia constructed by men of
highest intellect to control the public mind. Man simply cannot
escape from the clutches of the Superman by Pollyannaishly
closing his eyes to the dangers posed by the poisoned apples hidden
underneath the syntactically sugared declarations of universal human
rights made in the new sacred theology of Secular Humanism. It is
indeed a theology, one that is based on the perversity of
Doublethink.
As
previously examined and restating for emphasis, the logical and
entirely rational consequence of secular naturalism which posits that
life on earth is innately purposeless, that mankind arose by sheer
accident just like wildlife and wild flowers, and that natural order
which governs nature and its species, also governs man, is that since
there is no equality in nature (empirical observation), no altruism
in nature (another empirical observation, different from empathy
which is observed in some species), no justice in nature (yet another
empirical observation, no sheep has ever approached the king of the
jungle for justice from the wolf and not been eaten by the king
itself), then why should there be voluntary equality and altruism and
justice among the human species who are just another species of
nature? Some are lions and some are wolves while others are sheep.
What rational sense in having the same valuation for all of them? The
wolves may seek equality amongst themselves, and seek altruism in
their relationship with the hungry pride, but neither have any
inclination to extend either to the sheep --- but both of course
preach it to the sheep. How else will the wolves and lions satiate
their hungers and rule their kingdom? Thus the natural order of the
jungle, the natural philosophy of primacy, social darwinianism,
hegemony, is the natural order for human life as well.
But
of course that philosophy has to be disguised. The reality of secular
naturalism cannot be practiced too openly before the sheep who are
essential to the scheme of primacy. So the Secular Humanists come up
with advocacy of ancient truths like the Golden Rule for everyone,
lofty ideals on worthy pieces of parchment to lull the sheep to sleep
as their native religion is systematically stripped from their lives.
One can see the sophistry in the naturalists' arguments for man-made
morality derived solely from man's intellect, not just in theory, but
also empirically in the long and bloody history of primacy among
mankind; a history that is still unfolding in the twenty-first
century. The sheer chutzpah after the sheep have been lulled to sleep
is even seen in the National Security Advisor of the United States of
America writing the blueprint of superpower primacy coldly titled:
The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy And Its Geostrategic
Imperatives! ( Also see [a]
http://tinyurl.com/Islam-vs-Secular-Humanism ; [b]
http://tinyurl.com/Superman-Morality ; [c]
http://tinyurl.com/Problem-Primacy-not-Scarcity ; [d]
http://tinyurl.com/HGWells-Universal-Human-Rights ; [e]
http://tinyurl.com/MightyWurlitzer )
It
is also not persuasive to claim that reason can beget equality and
altruism and justice as higher order brain functions in the more
evolved superman of the future when it has shown to only beget
primacy ---- and Nietzschean Übermensch is ample evidence
of the culmination of that naturalists' philosophy. Secular Humanism
neither has any empirical merit, nor any philosophical merit given
their own sacred axiom of man's existence being accidental and
purposeless like any other life form. Lack of self-consistency with
their own naturalist axiom spells the death knell of the naturalists'
religion of secular humanism. It exposes their sophistry of
Doublethink!
The
naturalists' claim of reason and natural laws as the god of man
able to bring mankind equality, altruism, justice, as well as noble
governments and the end to primacy, under the religion of Secular
Humanism is only sophistry. It can only bring standards of the
Newspeak-Doublethink variety as was witnessed in the American
Declaration of Independence that is bandied about before the
world as the epitome of Western Liberal Republican Constitutional
Democracy (albeit the word “Democracy” itself does
not occur in its verbiage). That plan of liberty conveniently
excluded undesirable races who weren't deemed to be full human
beings deserving of “equal station
to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them”,
from its calculus of full human rights and equality. Australian
colonists as recently as the 1960s were hunting for Aborigine heads
as hunting trophies. Africa today, the cradle of mankind's
birthplace, is shamefully impoverished and plundered for its natural
wealth. The same story is repeated for South America, and the rest of
the developing nations of the world that have boundless riches
underneath their feet and living in abject poverty. Plundered by who?
By
the primacy instincts of the secular humanist West; exercised through its institutionalized multinational corporation
thuggery through neoliberal laws and free trade treaties, enforced
through tax-free trade zones and protected by Western military might
--- The reincarnation of East India Company in modern uniforms. The
modus operandi of modern neocolonialism is not much different from
the colonial era, and they boldly admit it themselves. Writing in the
New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman stated in his column of March 28,
1999: “The hidden hand of the market
will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish
without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden
fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is
called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
And
that colonial era of Western plunder, right after the Renaissance
philosophers taught all their lovely secular theories of superiority
of natural law and the primacy of reason, was the epitome of direct
colonial raping of the less sophisticated civilizations by the West
in the guise of la mission civilisatrice, the white man's
burden. None of the finer values of secular humanism were on display
as the natives were brutally harvested to serve global trade under
changing European flags of one PAX or another as the sophistication
of their primacy tools evolved. While the natives were taught that
this slavery was for their own good. They were being civilized. And
that was the price of being gifted Western civilization. The same
West today, the same nations, the same races of peoples, the same
inheritors of the East India Company, under the new flag of PAX
Americana, are out to destroy the one thing colonists couldn't take
away from the world's natives whom they otherwise lorded over as the
new gods --- their religion. And this last remaining treasure, the
inheritance of all mankind, is their focus of plunder for the
twenty-first century in which the same white man is once again
remaking world order. This time into a secular one-world empire.
The
naturalist is once again coldly speaking the language of might has
rights behind the facade of humanitarian platitudes, while
brazenly displaying its superiority of primacy techniques. The
predator makes the same arguments as before --- that this is good for
the natives. That the superiority of the Western civilization is due
to its secular naturalism, and it is its noble gift to all
civilizations when it strives to replace mankind's antediluvian
superstitious religions with the common world religion of Secular
Humanism. That is the very nature of natural law, the law of social
Darwinism, the survival of the fittest races, peoples, cultures
and civilizations. It conquers whenever it can. It is never satiated.
Neither did mankind witness equality, altruism and justice in the
past from the harbingers of secular naturalism, nor is it anywhere to
be seen today except in Newspeak, and nor will it be seen in
the future --- because it is not in the nature of secular naturalism.
The
tragedy is that the finest house niggers, mindless fools with
fancy Western university degrees, are once again taken in by the
chicaneries of the predators' Doublethink to begin loathing
what is their own heritage. They once again labor against their own
civilizations just as they did in the colonial era. The house nigger
has once again taken up the white man's burden --- and for
what? For the price of some applause and a meal ticket? This is not
to say that those who believe in the materialist dogma, irrespective
of who they are, aren't entitled to their own religion. But only to
state that the primacy of every dogma, every religion, every
predator, is rejected and must be confronted head on. That
confrontation is the principled teaching of absolutist moral codes,
and when attributed to Divine Revelation, become immutable. And that
is the one remaining intellectual threat to global primacy, the
spiritual threat from world religions, which is why they must all be
eliminated.
In
the previous sections we witnessed how axiomatic dogmas cripple
epistemology. Here we have again seen the polished Machiavellian
subversion of epistemology of Divine religions that only leads to the
primacy of natural law. If epistemology was not crippled, not only
would all self-ascribed categorical imperatives of primacy be
naturally crippled, but man would be rid of all dogmas that limit its
understanding of reality, and consequently, its egalitarian striving
for equality, justice, peace, happiness and growth would finally
materialize. The first baby step in that space is to confront primacy
head on. All primacy. Howsoever it is disguised. In law, in
platitudes, in Newspeak-Doublethink.
This
forensic attitude to scrutinizing epistemology with some measure of
objectivity, by distancing the observer from the observed, and by
perceptively understanding its hard and soft limits; the sources
of its corruption and motivations for its subversion, also helps
rectify idiotic divisions among peoples of boundless faith who
ceaselessly fight amongst themselves over insane matters. This
includes infighting on purely theological matters which quickly leads
to doctrinal warfare, and which can easily mutate into physical
warfare. And it also helps counter Machiavelli when it too,
ceaselessly, uses their inanity and senseless divisions to harness
their boundless energies as useful idiots; zealots and prima
donnas who unwittingly end up doing Machiavelli's diabolical bidding
like puppets on a string.
The
following was described by this author in his essay: Averting
Shia-Sunni World War, in his attempt to help heal the idiotic
bifurcation among Muslims between its Shia and Sunni sects (and their
respective subsects) for want of a clearer understanding of
epistemological issues when they each hold the same common Good Book,
the Holy Qur'an, as sacred and believe it to be Divine Revelation.
The preceding discussion has demonstrated a reasoned rejection
criterion for adjudicating Divinity of any source. But it has also
argued that the acceptance criterion does not necessarily follow. In
the final analysis, one must make recourse to intuition and insight,
the subjectivity of awareness and higher consciousness conferred upon
the human mind by its right-half brain. To pretend that the
right-half brain does not exist in human beings when it actually
does, or has no utility in understanding reality and only the
rational logical problem solving left-half brain is of any value to
understanding reality, one must go back to understanding the limits
of the Logic mind captured in the distinction between Mr. Spock (the
solely left-half brain alien logician) and Captain Kirk (balance of
left and right-half brain human being) in the Star Trek fable. It is
notable that Captain Kirk always trumps and amazes Mr. Spock in how
he always manages to get out of existential crises by using both his
faculties of reason and intuition (see
http://tinyurl.com/Limits-of-Logic-Mind). Anyone who denies using
intuition alongside his reason in his or her decision-making, is
either not telling the truth, or is lacking in some higher aspects of
human brain function which is also seen to be lacking in primates.
Begin
Excerpt
Such
individual endeavors automatically plant the fundamental seeds of
amity among Muslims: to gather around the Holy Qur'an for
comprehending any and all issues which divide us, as the primary
source of seeking understanding of the Divine scripture. To
understand what the Holy Qur'an itself teaches on its own topics,
instead of what the pen of holy man says it teaches. This endeavor,
undertaken with a desire to learn rather than to confirm
presuppositions, dissuades from the idiotic sectarian disunity that
is evidently natural to us, preventing us from becoming one people,
an ummah, because of the artifacts of history, historiography,
hagiography and the unfortunate socialization into that orthodoxy. We
are all beholden to this socialized orthodoxy by birth such that
despite our best intentions, we, in fact, end up following the
religion of our forefathers as in the infamous age of Jahiliya
of antiquity. Is our age, the modern age, fundamentally all that
different?
Without
hesitation I advance the argument that our base attitudes are really
not all that much different despite our traveling in modern airliners
instead of on camels and horses. Our civilization may have marched on
outwardly, but inwardly, we are still living in the past. We still
continue to draw on our meagre understanding of what is largely the
socialized past, to inform us on how to interpret our present.
Socialization into our history as part of both culture, and what is
deemed religious, continues to inform our beliefs and order our
rituals. It is that base reality which fundamentally divides us into
Shia and Sunni by birth. This is self-evident. The end result, under
Machiavellian doctrinal motivation and tickling of the right
sensibilities --- fratricide, Muslims killing Muslims. Whereas, the
Holy Qur'an, which contains none of that history, historiography, or
hagiography, nor sects and partisanship, easily unites us if we only
permit the Good Book to speak for itself. If we only permit its
verses to be the main source of interpretation for its own verses,
without referring to what the hand of man conjured up to become the
happenstances of history (historical events) and its partisan
narratives (hadith literature, who said what to whom). By definition
history and its narratives are anecdotal, for, indeed, an alternate
history and alternate future is always possible. Whereas the Good
Book, the Holy Qur'an, is Divine Guidance for all histories and all
futures of mankind --- empowering mankind to change its own
conditions and its own futures --- if one accepts its assertion of
timeless Divine Guidance to all mankind. How can one particular
instance of history among a tribal people circumscribe its
understanding? It sensibly follows that it cannot. For that reason
none of the particulars of the period of revelations is in the Holy
Qur'an which otherwise uses ample histories and parables of other
nations past to forewarn Muslims of what can become of them if they
followed the same paths.
Preventing
that transition of understanding the Holy Scripture from its own
verses in the light of one's own times, is not just in the interest
of both the empire du jour and the clergy classes for the abundant
opportunities of divide and control that status quo confers, but also
self-interest. Who likes to accept that they have been largely
socialized into myths as religion?
Compounding
that reality of social control is the cognitive infiltration from the
dominance of Western modernity that is wholly materialistic, and
which altogether denies the legitimacy of spiritual existence and
Divine Guidance. Charles Taliaferro, a professor of philosophy at St.
Olaf College, says in his interview to Tehran Times (January 7,
2016):
“[T]here
is not an intensive quest in European and American university and
college courses to reconstruct the life of the Prophet Muhammad
(peace be upon him). Perhaps this is partly a reflection of what many
historians in the West believe about Jesus: they think it very
difficult to get behind the primary sources to Jesus himself and so
they focus more on the emergence and history of Christianity rather
than highlight the historical Jesus. As a
philosopher I believe that such skepticism about the historical Jesus
and Muhammad is based on philosophical assumptions of secular
naturalism which presupposes by definition that prophecy and
revelation is impossible, an assumption that, in my view, is
unjustified. Historically, there are Western sources that
depict Islam as a dangerous threat to Western civilization. ...”
Well,
not just historically, but it is very much the present narrative in
the West. And our own new Muslim and non-Muslim generations in both
hemispheres are growing up under that universal cultural rubric.
Whatever we know or believe or understand of Islam is a reaction to
the mantras and presuppositions of our own time, just as it was in
the past for the mantras and presuppositions of their own time. That
fundamental presupposition today, as the quoted philosopher says, is
“secular naturalism which presupposes by definition that
prophecy and revelation is impossible,”. Evidently, a lot more
Muslims also believe that to be true despite all our pious
proclamations if one were to judge from our lack of study of the
scripture itself. While it is understandable that non Muslims may
have little interest in studying the Holy Qur'an, strangely, few
Muslims dare to apply their own intellect to study a scripture which
so boldly presupposes and continually affirms that the Holy Qur'an is
indeed a revealed book. We instead go to our own elders for the
source of our religious beliefs.
Well,
that is precisely what the Arabs in their age of Jahiliya did too.
They did not believe that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was a
Prophet of God bringing them Divine revelations as Guidance from
Beyond. They instead relied on their own elders for their beliefs. It
is irrelevant what their beliefs were. The source of their belief was
their own socialization, their own elders, their own heritage.
Shocking? What do you do when you open up your favorite hadith and
history books? Or your favorite exegeses? You are using your elders,
long dead, to tell you what your socialized religion is. That fact
has divided us into Shia and Sunni. Not the Holy Qur'an, but the
pious works of our elders. That observation is beyond doubt. It is
self-evident.
The
revealing term used by professor Charles Taliaferro, “secular
naturalism”, begs a few sentences of explanation for those who
may be unfamiliar with its scope and how we are all affected by it
without often realizing it. It fundamentally means that the laws of
nature are general, universal, and a-religious. These natural laws
determine the “how” of nature and apply in all frames of
reference to everything in existence, including to man. The rational
and objectifying processes of science applied by man to understand
these natural laws are the best method to discover and harness this
“how” of nature. In the laws of nature there is no such
construct as moral law. Morality is but a subjective value system,
and all spiritual questions of the “why” of existence are
immanent, i.e., philosophical, in the mind of man, entirely abstract,
and not part of the laws of nature. Naturalists separate the two
quests between objective and subjective: science deals with “how”,
religion deals with “why”. That core presupposition of
modern Jahiliya, that there is nothing beyond the laws of nature,
automatically precludes all notions of divinity, and consequently,
also divine revelation, prophethood, etc., thus making morality and
world religions a mere utilitarian convention among their respective
philosophers for inducing social harmony, or social control, among
the sheep.
This
materialist conception of nature stemming from the core philosophy of
“secular naturalism”, taken to its natural conclusion
leads society and civilization to the path of social Darwinianism and
Nietzschean Nihilism when led by his ablest Superman. Whence, all
things concerning the affairs of man become relative and arbitrary,
where ends justify means, wolves appear in sheep clothing, and where
might and intelligence, abilities and skills, cunning and
sophistication determine the survival of the species under the
natural law of the Jungle, survival of the fittest. In that
existential reality of rule by force, or might disguised as moral
law, the ones with more narrative power win in controlling their
flock --- and this is how divide and conquer has always succeeded in
the service of the most cunning power.
The
narrative today emanating from all pulpits, including the
geopolitical pulpits, after the “militant Islam” mantras
and after getting Muslims to kill each other in many different
guises, is eschatology, the Last Days, the arrival of Imam Mahdi, the
Awaited Savior of mankind.
Is
that concept of divine interventionism and eschatology which is
common to both Shia and Sunni theology with minor variations, in the
Holy Qur'an itself?
It
is important to learn this fact because as those given to the study
of geopolitics can easily fear, the narrative of eschatology may well
become a key source of doctrinal motivation, intellectual commitment,
and patriotic gratification, for both camps in the long war being
engineered between the 1.6 to 2 billion Shiadom vs. Sunnidom by those
obeying the secular natural laws and its corollaries.
Let's
not fall for the fabricated narratives of Machiavelli again and
again. Inform our leaders, our generals, our rulers, our scholars,
our opinion-makers, that we do not wish to be participant in their
geopolitical games. That we are not sheep and that we refuse to
service the mutton eaters. That we have no quarrel among Shia and
Sunni and that we choose to proactively gather on the Holy Qur'an to
bridge our reactionary chasms of history instead of on their
narratives.
End
Excerpt
Here
is the fundamental problem. It was described by this author in
several essays over several years in his attempt to get an objective
handle on pseudo science that is used to control the public mind. The
following is excerpted from the case study: Was America's Moon
Landing a Big Lie? How can one forensically investigate that question
today? The case study is subtitled: Disambiguating Religion,
Science and Psychological Warfare Operations.
Begin
Excerpt
[I]t
is always harder to prove things true, but far easier to falsify.
Basic fact-checks can often reveal falsehoods easily, for instance.
But truth is often difficult to "prove". This philosophical
fact of the matter even forms the basis of the famous Occam's razor
principle in science to construct what is called the scientific
process. It is used to formulate the bare minimum and simplest
possible axioms necessary for theorizing empiricism; assumptions or
statements which cannot be proved to be true, but are presumed to be
true with the possibility of falsification. The scientific axioms in
the scientific process are held to be true until shown to be false.
Precisely because proving the “truth” on fundamental
fronts is always harder and often borders on beliefs.
The
difference between that and religion is singular – religion
permits no falsification of its axioms, but scientific axioms are in
fact contingent on their being falsifiable. And once deemed false,
the axioms are abandoned, or circumscribed to their applicable limits
as warranted. So far, everything I have punched into Google, or
wikipedia from this article bears out that very point out --- that
the “truth” of the matter cannot easily be proved on the
topic at hand: the scientific evidence of America's landing of man on
the moon in 1969 has not been preserved for any third party to
adjudicate the claims of the United States Government as underwritten
by its organization NASA (see below). Therefore, in its absence, the
claims can only be falsified, unless that claim borders on religious
faith! Is the belief in America's manned mission to moon in Apollo 11
a religion? And conversely, is disbelief in that narrative another
religion? For a scientist passionate about his search for truth and
inquiry, neither of these can be true.
Thus
we, as passionate scientists, both as hard scientists of physical
sciences, and as social scientists fully cognizant of all modalities
of social engineering, proceed in examining the available empirical
evidence with the fewest possible axioms none of which must hinge
upon faith and belief in officialdom, or in its detractors' atheism.
And therein the real difficulty commences:
(1)
What is empirical data on which we make observations – how do
we define data?
(2)
Is it data that is born from official narratives?
(3)
Is it data that is recovered from declassified documents?
(4)
Is it the data that is easily accessible to scientists so that the
scientific method can be applied to it?
At
some point in that process of defining what is data, and specifically
when data is not directly generated by the observing scientist, nor
directly accessible to him, nor directly reproducible by him, axioms
must come into play. Axioms that are reasonable assumptions and
falsifiable. When this data impinges on social engineering however, a
fuzzy “trust” factor gets coupled to the construction of
the axiom, such as trust in government, trust in its institutions,
trust in its authority figures that they don't lie, all of which have
the tendency to induce group-think which is more akin to religious
beliefs than to falsifiable scientific axioms.
End
Excerpt
We
see that the tendency to appeal to authority figures, encouraging
trust in authority figures, state institutions and scientific bodies,
and in democracy numbers, meaning, how many authority figures say the
same thing, as opposed to whether they are right or not, is the bane
of modern science. Let's see how that creates epistemological
problems in uncovering the reality of a matter when science
intersects with social science.
The
epistemological problem is described in this author's approach to
understanding the so called scientific analysis of the hard
catastrophic events of 9-11 when, in one single day, not just two
millions of tons of steel-concrete tall buildings named WTC-1 and
WTC-2 were inexplicably demolished by exploding into fine particulate
dust in a demolition wave that appeared to travel faster than gravity
acceleration, and not just a third 47-story steel-concrete tall
building called WTC-7 was inexplicably demolished at free-fall speed
into its own foot-print – all caught on newsmedia broadcast
footage and watched by the entire planet – but the entire WTC
complex comprising several other buildings suffered inexplicable and
irreparable damage the video footage of which was not broadcast on
television. These can be seen in publicly available photographs. The
entire WTC complex had just been leased a few months prior to
9-11-2001 from the New York Port Authority and insured for billions
of dollars against terrorism which was quickly collected from the
insurance company who paid out the monies without a murmur. The
following is excerpted from the author's preliminary study of the
scientific method and its epistemological limits when applied to
understanding the events of that day: Comment on Judy Wood's 'The
New Hiroshima'.
Begin
Excerpt
There
is a fundamental issue here, namely, that of layers of deception to
mask both the methods and the culprits of 9/11. Deceptions in who
dunnit is already obvious. [4] Deception in the method of executing
9/11 by the perpetrators; deceptively removing the crime scene and
destroying all evidence in the name of cleanup before any forensic
study could be performed or evidence preserved for later forensic
examination; deception in the myriad cover stories to mask how it was
done; deception in misleading and/or concocting any and all
investigations spanning the gamut from the official 9/11 Commission
and the official NIST studies to the so called private investigators
from the academe and from among the activists; have all muddied up
the waters by each insisting that their evidence-set and their
explanations are the most accurate 'truth'. And what's the best way
to obfuscate even honest thinking civilians looking at whatever is
available from the photographic evidence and the dust field?
Fabricate evidence and leave a whole string of false clues behind.
In
this maze of layered deceptions, it is not always obvious what is
real evidence, what is cover story, and what is the deception-spin by
the Mighty Wurlitzer's agents and assets (see A Note on the Mighty
Wurlitzer - Anatomy of Modern Propaganda Techniques [5]). Anyone can
write anything. Anyone can publish a book. Anyone can doctor
photographs. And anyone can publish a scientific paper on Bentham
Open for $800 in the name of “peer review”. I had checked
this out myself a while back. Which peer reviewed publication asks
for money? Heck, anyone can publish even junk science, from false
theories to utter rubbish, in respectable peer reviewed science
journals (see Reflections on Science in the Service of Empire [6]).
And of course, Galileo was not published in his time – meaning,
real truth which goes against the ruling interests is a rare
commodity in public discourses. Especially, when it pertains to such
a crime as the New Pearl Harbor the unraveling of which goes against
the state's agendas. Such truths, for one thing, cannot be easily
ferreted out, and for another, cannot be easily vented without
systematic demonization, and ultimately, assassination.
Therefore,
it is easy to suggest look at evidence. But when the Mighty Wurlitzer
and his minions in the academe, media, and in “truth”
investigations teams are at work, just to figure out what is evidence
and what are false clues can be a formidable challenge for genuine
detectives. And when the pursuit is taken over by faux detectives
whose only purpose is to mislead real detectives by introducing what
Cass Sunstein called “beneficial cognitive diversity”,
the problem is compounded. Perhaps even made intractable and
unamenable to a solution in a time frame that is meaningful to
preventing faits accomplis. 150 years later, just as today
even sixth graders learn how the natives were exterminated from the
Americas with biowarfare and smallpox, our progeny may also study how
9/11 was executed in their junior-high history books with a clarity
that is unavailable to the best detective today.
Therefore,
for those attempting to study 9/11, it is primarily a forensic case
for a Sherlock Holmes and a Hercule Poirot who can draw on expert
opinions as pertinent and set aside other expert opinions as false,
rather than some simplistic noble minded (and Nobel minded [2])
scientists and self-ascribed scholars of truth assuming that the only
thing false about 9/11 was the false-flag operation of demolishing
the towers, but everything else is straightforward including the
“evidence”. Nothing is straightforward. A criminal mind
that can plan and execute the 9/11 as 'Operation Canned Goods' for
creating the pretext for “imperial mobilization” is
certainly also diabolically smart enough to realize that it also
would require cover stories and the subsequent spins, including
leaving a trail of enticing red herrings right at the crime scene. If
an overzealous detective picks up one or more of these red herrings
as if they are real clues, and creates his erudite analysis on this
“evidence”, you know where he ends up – in the
woods! No pun intended.
Having
accurate evidence to base subsequent rational analysis on, is the
sine qua non of getting useful and real scientific results which are
un-biased, un-agendist. Therefore, keeping in mind that if one is
interested in fabricating conclusions for hidden motivations, always,
almost always, faulty evidence has to be employed and passed off as
real evidence, followed by faulty logic and specious reasoning to
reach the pre-determined conclusion. Therefore, the emphasis on
acquiring untampered and genuine data followed by correct reasoning
process cannot be over emphasized. Those employing the former used to
be called “sophists” in ancient Greece, but today, I'll
just straightforwardly call them prostituting for empire to cause
them maximum offense.
End
Excerpt
The
author has continued the examination of the corruption of science due
to crippled epistemology in his reflections: Reflections on
Modernity, Climategate, Pandemic, Peer Review, and Science in the
Service of Empire (
http://tinyurl.com/science-in-service-of-empire ). And in his
analysis of the pseudo science of global warming: Global Warming /
Climate Change A New Religion (
http://tinyurl.com/religion-of-global-warming ). The following
depiction of the crumbling pillars of science due to its
replicability crisis, is from the Bibliography Corruption of
Science in Reflections:
Caption
“In September 2015, the international scientific journal Nature
published a cartoon showing the temple of “Robust Science”
in a state of collapse. What is going on?” -- Rupert Sheldrake
(image courtesy of Nature via Rupert Sheldrake)
Here
is the fundamental problem. It was first described by this author in
his attempt to get a forensic handle on the system in which the super
learned Technetronic technicians of empire become so easily
co-opted into selling their soul to the devil in Faustian bargains,
often even being unaware of that fact. The condition of knowledge
explosion that fashions either “narrow-gauged
specialists or superficial generalists” is, at
least on the face of it, the natural outcome of data
availability bias.
As
data mushrooms from the rapid advancement of knowledge, an
individual's ability to assimilate it naturally diminishes. Which
means it is easy to remain ignorant of many matters of pertinence.
That is self-evident. But it is not the entire story. The issue is
explored in this author's essay: The Fable of the Bees and the
Seduction of Science and Technology Corrupting the Intellect and the
Soul.
While
the modality of co-option in the pursuit of self-interest is well
understood from the discussion in preceding sections, the rapid
knowledge explosion in a system where knowledge equates with primacy
and hegemony, also makes it easier to not know that which does does
not present any opportunity for career advancement, and that which
may be detrimental to self-interest. The system makes that co-option
both easier and palatable. But how does the system do that? Let's
take a look.
Begin
Excerpt
How
did we get to this co-opting modernity?
Below
is just a cursory roadmap of how we got to this modernity that I have
been able to piece together as an amateur historian, amateur social
scientist, and former professional technologist who walked away from
the same highly applauded passions in the same engineering profession
as Eric Fossum, now thanklessly applying the same rational skills in
a new passionate hobby. A hobby that is of utmost existential import
and of immediate pertinence to mankind's survival as an independent,
sentient, and thoughtful moral beings, but for which there is no
applause. No medals. No prizes. Only hemlock. Influential scholarly
scientists like Dr. Eric Fossum can and do make substantial
difference to this calculus, in any direction. So why not in the
direction their own inner moral voice uncannily whispers to them –
rather than continuing in the suicidal direction of their baser
instincts, passions and self-interests?
In
order to be most succinct in this outline and still make sense to
brilliant people unlearned in their own nation's literature of
primacy, I must begin by quoting Edward Bernays:
“The
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an
invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
--- Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, pg. 1
The
necessity of maintaining and manipulating a public's ignorance and
perceptions through self-indulgences, through deliberately dumbing
them down with bread and circuses, though wholly self-evident today,
was already well thought out at the very dawn of the industrial age
in the early eighteenth century. Bernard de Mandeville in his famous
classic The Fable of the Bees, observed:
“The
economic well-being of the nation depends on the presence of a large
number of men who are content to labor hard all day long. Because men
are naturally lazy they will not work unless forced by necessity to
do so.” --- Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1705
That
philosophy, to create “a large
number of men who are content to labor hard all day long ... forced
by necessity” espoused in The Fable of the
Bees, inspired Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of
Nations, to propose the pursuit of selfish industriousness for
the overall common good. Of course, common good primarily of the
ruling class with trickle-down economics, but that's just buried in
the Newspeak definition of common good where the common man labors
hard all day long, and the elites enjoy the good. Patterned upon the
bees collectively making that marvelous tasting honey for the
enjoyment of the bears, each bee myopically and narrowly staying busy
in its own specialized micro-task “content to labor hard all
day long”, rests the entire edifice of modern civilization.
This
philosophy of selfish myopic industriousness for common good has been
very sagaciously adapted to the high-tech age of the Technetronic
Era. Modernity requires rather high-tech specialized worker-bees,
with the commensurate twist of creating educated morons with advanced
university degrees who can very patriotically “United We Stand”
for the common good while staying productively engaged in narrow
specializations in the military-industrial economy! This man-made
value system of human beings as economic widgets “content
to labor hard all day long”, has today spread
like a virus across the full gamut of gainful employment in the
globalized corporate world, from blue collar to white collar, from
traders to craftsman, from technicians to scientists, from
superficial generalists to narrow-gauged specialists.
Kept
perpetually too busy to either think independently, morally,
holistically, and outside their parameters of narrow-gauge
specializations by the sheer demands of having to pay their endless
debt-bills in pursuit of their endless “American Dreams”,
and conversely, by ensuring that a handful of the more successful and
most intellectual ones are so generously rewarded and applauded for
their narrow-gauge specializations that they become vested in their
own successes continuing, statecraft today relies on inflicting The
Fable of the Bees upon man for its own dystopian functioning. It
is therefore no surprise that possession of technological information
and technical skills to manipulate matter, has been recast as
profound human knowledge, and parrots and fools have been turned into
learned savants.
A
state of modern affairs which infects modern man quite
democratically. We are, despite all the vast data on our fingertips
in this Information Age, and despite all the sophistication of modern
gadgetry, still living in the age of Jahiliya (ignorance)!
This ignorance is by artful design in the industrious West,
especially in the sole superpower, United States of America –
as already examined by this scribe in his maiden 2003 book Prisoners
of the Cave which analyzed the condition of mass ignorance among
the people of the United States, keyed off from the blueprint for
“imperial mobilization” outlined by Dr. Zbigniew
Brzezinski in his 1996 ode to American Primacy and Its
Geostrategic Imperatives, The Grand Chessboard.
This
state of affairs is not just due to the happenstance of knowledge
explosion in modernity as Zbigniew Brzezinski would have the gullible
thoughtlessly believe. Brzezinski had speciously observed in his
earlier 1970 book that “the threat
of intellectual fragmentation, posed by the gap between the pace in
the expansion of knowledge and the rate of its assimilation”,
is what causes general myopia in the Technetronic Era. Well, such
perception molding is very convenient to promulgate. It justifies,
nay dignifies, the lack of awareness among the learned living in
industrialized societies under great self-obsessions and unbridled
self-indulgences.
That
state of being enables keeping the public, even the most educated of
the lot, quite ignorant of what really matters to statecraft: the
absence of awareness among the worker-bees that they are really
toiling for the bears, while they glorifyingly slave in their
own narrow-gauge specializations for one motivation or another. Here
is Zbigniew Brzezinski's sophistry which attempts to
pseudo-philosophize the information explosion conversely impacting
individual awareness and intellectual cohesion:
'...
it can be argued that in some respects "understanding" ...
is today much more difficult for most people to attain. ...
The
science explosion – the most rapidly expanding aspect of our
entire reality, growing more rapidly than population, industry, and
cities – intensifies, rather than reduces, these feelings of
insecurity. It is simply impossible for the average citizen and even
for men of intellect to assimilate and meaningfully organize the flow
of knowledge for themselves.
In
every scientific field complaints are mounting that the torrential
outpouring of published reports, scientific papers, and scholarly
articles and the proliferation of professional journals make it
impossible for individuals to avoid becoming either narrow gauged
specialists or superficial generalists. The sharing of new common
perspectives thus becomes more difficult as knowledge expands;
in addition, traditional perspectives such as those provided by
primitive myths or, more recently, by certain historically
conditioned ideologies can no longer be sustained.
The
threat of intellectual fragmentation, posed by the gap between the
pace in the expansion of knowledge and the rate of its assimilation,
raises a perplexing question concerning the prospects for mankind's
intellectual unity.' --- Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970,
pg. 15
Let
me highlight the two key empirical observations from that
aforementioned passage: “make it
impossible for individuals to avoid becoming either narrow-gauged
specialists or superficial generalists. The sharing of new common
perspectives thus becomes more difficult as knowledge expands;”.
The self-serving cyclic argument of Brzezinski is that firstly,
ignorance about knowledge, due to the sheer explosion in knowledge,
is the natural outcome of scientific modernity. Secondly, that people
can no longer easily reach a common “understanding” of
their common condition. Both those observations are empirically true
today.
But
one can easily imagine an alternate modernity where that need not be
the case despite the abundance of knowledge explosion. It was the
corporatization of knowledge in the service of empire in the vast
military-industrial-academe complexes of the industrialized world,
and its tight coupling to the exercise of hegemony, that has made it
so. Science and technology today equate with hegemony. Therefore,
since the quest for hegemony is perpetual, its ultimate expression
being world government, those pursuing science and technology have to
continue passionately slaving in the service of empire as
“narrow-gauged specialists”, often unaware that their
honey-pot is being harvested by the bears calculatingly funding the
worker-bees.
End
Excerpt
This
tortuous reality of the system which induces myopia by design is
depicted quite openly in both dystopic fables and movies. For
instance, the dialog fragment from the Hollywood movie: The Bourne
Legacy, excerpted in this scribe's report: What's the truth
about modern medicine?
(http://tinyurl.com/Self-Serving-Innocence-Bourne), captures how that
self-serving myopia of the super technicians of the technetronic
society just automatically falls out from the way the system is
set up to exploit natural human passions which become co-opting
weaknesses in its excesses. This system develops and rewards
narrow-gauged specialists
while disincentivizing dissent. The pursuit of the American Dream
leaves no time or inclination for anything else anyway. The hard
reality of knowledge explosion in the absence of awareness of what is
deliberately kept hidden from public view like the unseen portion of
an iceberg, easily exacerbates data availability bias.
It naturally leads to a crippled epistemology in virtually every
domain of human knowledge that is of consequence to the interests of
power; power that funds and applauds under various doctrines of god,
country, profit, and egotistical gratification. The mad scientists
are not born, but made by this system which funds science in the
service of empire. While one may argue that the telling dialog in The
Bourne Legacy is just fictional art, it is also art imitating
life.
As
for instance, in the Swine flu scare of both 1976 and 2009. In both
cases the public under intense propaganda cover was goaded into
taking untested vaccines with gross side-effects under the threat of
pandemic killing them. The doctors too blindly carried out the orders
of their own institutional bosses and authority bodies like WHO and
CDC. What was in those vaccines that the threat was amplified
thousand fold and draconian laws enacted to forcibly administer them?
Live active H5N1 avian flu viruses in the case of Baxter's 2009
vaccine batch that was only serendipitously caught before the scare
could actually become a manufactured pandemic (see the two 2009 news
reports: http://tinyurl.com/Baxter-live-viruses-Bloomberg and
http://tinyurl.com/Baxter-live-viruses-Canadian ). How did dangerous
live active viruses reassortment that is only handled in BSL-4
plus labs get into manufactured vaccine product? Which mad
scientists did that work and under what delusions (god, country,
profit, or just gratifying the ego)? The following depiction of
Hysteria vs Reality is telling: those caught in the hysteria
became easy victims of the diabolically crippled epistemology:
Caption
Hysteria vs. Reality - Reconstruction of a Mass Hysteria - The Swine
Flu Panic of 2009 By DER SPIEGEL Staff March 12, 2010
Similarly,
at the present time, the same kind of intense fear mongering is being
waged on the public mind with Global Warming / Climate Change scare,
that it is the consequence of man's activity, in order to get the
world's public to change its attitude and behavior as outlined in the
goals of United Nations Agenda 21.
So,
is there or isn't there man-made global warming / climate change? How
can the public adjudicate on that contemporary question under the
crippled epistemology that is being pushed not just in worldwide
mainstream news media, not just vicariously through movies and
documentaries, but also in science academies, universities,
respectable publications like Nature, and respectable governmental
bodies like NASA and NOAA? Since the general public is even more of a
victim of data availability bias – they hardly
ever read even when dissenting reports are available – they end
up feeding off of the crippled epistemology foisted upon them by
these authority heads who surround them with “political
truths”, i.e., half truths, three-quarter truths, and outright
lies. How can they all be wrong --- when that's the only view the
public is shown while all others are marginalized as conspiracists
and kooks (see http://tinyurl.com/religion-of-global-warming).
The
increasing public ignorance coupled to the gradual appearance of more
and more controlled societies worldwide, is not just due to knowledge
explosion naturally outpacing man's ability to keep up with his
times, but because the primary motivation in the technetronic
society is societal control. Let's permit Zbigniew Brzezinski to
also have the last word on this matter from his 1970 book: Between
Two Ages – America's Role in the Technetronic Era.
“In
the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the
individual support of millions of unorganized citizens,
who are easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive
personalities, and effectively exploiting
the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and
control reason.” (pg. 11)
“Another
threat, less overt but no less basic, confronts liberal democracy.
More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the
gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society.
Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to
political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific knowhow.
Unhindered by the restraints of traditional
liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its
political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing
public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and
control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and
technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would
actually feed on the situation it exploits.
The
emergence of a large dominant party, alongside the more narrowly
focused and more intensely doctrinaire groupings on the right and the
left, could accelerate the trend toward such technological
managerialism. Such a large dominant party would combine
American society's quest for stability with its historical affinity
for innovation. Relying on scientific growth to produce the means for
dealing with social ills, it would tap the nation's intellectual
talent for broad target planning and exploit the existence of
doctrinaire groups by using them as social barometers and as sources
of novel ideas. Persisting social crisis,
the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of
mass media to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in
the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly
controlled society.” (pg. 97)
About
The Author
The
author, a justice activist, formerly a Silicon Valley systems
architect (see engineering patents at
http://tinyurl.com/zahir-patents
), founded Project Humanbeingsfirst.org in the aftermath of 9/11. He
was, mercifully, most imperfectly educated in the United States of
America, which might explain how he escaped the fate of
“likkha-parrha-jahils” mass produced from its vast
manufacturing consent complex with all his neurons still intact, and
still firing on all cylinders. Email: humanbeingsfirst@gmail.com
. Verbatim reproduction license at:
http://humanbeingsfirst.org/#Copyright
.
Abridged
Version: Reflections
on Axioms, Presuppositions, Faith, Intuition, Reason, Philosophy and
their Impact on Epistemology
Faith-Politico
URL:
http://faith-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2016/12/some-problems-in-epistemology.html
Homepage
Synopsis URL:
http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2016/12/some-problems-in-epistemology.html
First
Published Sunday, December 18, 2016 12:00 am | Last updated Saturday, January 21, 2017
10:00 pm
33707
Some
Problems in Epistemology By Zahir Ebrahim | Project
Humanbeingsfirst.org 78/78