“that which is divinely natural,
but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science.“
Mary Baker Eddy
Well, we are indeed in the presence of a miracle.
In the presence of a wonderful miracle!
In spite of the entrenched obstinacy of some ‘infallible’ and very powerful agents – who had Giordano Bruno burned in a public square for maintaining exactly the same thing – we have finally accepted this as a fact.
Some of us, at least…
‘Exploring the consequences of our limited consciences‘
A truth is, first and foremost, an expression.
A message, formulated by an observer, describing a portion of what the person expressing themselves considers to be a ‘portion’ of ‘reality’. Being a message, any truth is formulated by means of a language.
Does anybody know everything about any subject? About anything, actually?
No, nobody knows everything about anything. Hence there is no such thing as a complete truth.
Furthermore, being expressed by means of a language, a truth – any expression, actually – will never be able to convey to the person receiving the message everything the transmitter intended to say. The transmitter is never able to cram ‘everything’ inside an inherently limited message, no language is absolutely ‘precise’ and no receiver will ever interpret any message the way the transmitter intended it to mean. Hence even if anybody will ever learn everything about anything, that person will never be able to convey that knowledge to anybody else. Let alone to everybody else…
What next?
‘Never ever believe anything? Anymore?!?’
Is it possible for us, humans living in concert, to cooperate in this manner?
Knowing that nothing which is being said, one way or another, is ‘true’? Completely true?
Well, we did get this far, didn’t we?
We’ve been expressing ourselves, in the imperfect manner I described above, since we’ve learned to use language. Since we’ve learned to speak…
70 000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, is when some scientists believe we’ve started to communicate more or less like we do now. The people living then had the same genes we have now and the bones they have left us to dig up and stare at are similar to ours. Hence the only thing which differentiates us from our ancestors is our culture. A treasure of knowledge which has been noticed – bit by bit, formulated using language – message by message, and remembered, one way or another. Hence the only difference between us and our ancestors is a collection of incomplete – and imperfectly interpreted – pieces of truth.
Then again, is it possible for us – humans living in concert – to cooperate by means of incomplete and ‘misinterpreted’ pieces of truth?
Well, we came this far going (up?) this way, didn’t we?
It seems that as long as we do it ‘in good faith’ things will, eventually, ‘mesh up’ just fine!
Which leads us to ‘the truth’. ‘The’ as different from ‘A’ truth.
While a truth is a message, the truth is a state of mind.
The understanding of the fact that what we call ‘reality’ can be learned only ‘in concert’.
Only as long as we help each-other along the process. Only as long as each time we formulate ‘a message’ we do our best to ‘speak the truth’.
The sign itself is simply true.
The only intriguing aspect in all this is the courage of the person who had affixed it!
You see, the first religious beliefs/cosmological explanations maintained that the whole ‘creation’ had been given birth by the ‘First Mother’. People in those times – like all of us – were just extrapolating their everyday knowledge into the metaphysical realm. Which hadn’t yet been given that name…
After the advent of agriculture – which had introduced the notion of property/inheritance, hence the need to defend those things – men took over. As owners – better suited for war – and then as dispensers of meaning. A.k.a. priests.
God followed suit. It had become a Father and a Shepard. It still is in the minds of the ordinary believers.
Reading some theology – it’s enough to scrap the surface – I found out that most theologians maintained that God was unfathomable. That its main characteristic is the fact that it is ‘hidden’.
Then how come some of us are so sure about its gender? About its will? About what it means for us to do?!?
As usual, Chomsky is only half-right.
Opportunities shouldn’t be provided. Period!
In fact, nobody should be able to control/provide sizable amounts of opportunity!
On the other hand, making it so that only a small number of people enjoy all the opportunities in the world is, indeed, criminal.
Unsustainable for the longer time frame, actually!
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate
their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
I have spent the first 30 years of my life under communist rule.
Under a communist yoke, actually.
I have witnessed Trump being elected President of the United States.
Thrown out by popular vote.
Then I watched Mike Pence being spirited away by the Secret Service. Some of those convinced by Trump’s Big Lie were chasing the Vice President inside the Capitol in an attempt to…
The US Supreme Court reversed Roe vs Wade.
Prigozhin, also known as Putin’s chef – and lately the mastermind behind PMC Wagner – had become so pissed that organized a field trip. Then turned his troops around and went to Belarus.
What’s going on here?!?
The world has become a battle-field.
A political battle-field where ‘right’ and ‘left’ fight for control.
Both sides oblivious to the fact that politics is, or more exactly ‘should be’, about solving people’s problems.
Given my experience – half a life spent under communist yoke – people expect me to root for the right side of the political spectrum. Which I do.
But I’m also fully aware that the left would have had no chance, absolutely no chance at all, if those on the right had been just a tad more considerate.
And here’s the catch.
There’s no such thing as a good left but there are a good right and a bad right.
The bad thing about the left – about the entire left – is the fact they ‘know better’. All of them. The left is choke full of solutions. Whenever somebody says ‘I noticed there’s a problem with… What are your thoughts about this subject?’ somebody from the left will surely grab the opportunity: ‘we’ve already told you that this and that had to be done a long time ago in order to solve this thing before it even happened’!
The bad thing about the right, the militant portion of the modern right, is that they’ve become just like their sworn enemies. They’ve somehow convinced themselves that ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ and that’s what they did. They joined the left in battle. Using the very tools they have borrowed from the left and adopting the very same attitude.
The bad kind of right are also convinced that ‘they know better’. That you have to be a moron in order to be a ‘liberal’. Or, at least, a ‘greenhorn’. “If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain”.
In fact, it’s exactly this infatuation with their own ‘brains’ which is the worst thing about the left. And about the bad right.
I see no difference between Marx’s “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” and Trump’s ‘truthful hyperbole’.
You see, Trump isn’t a self made man, as he pretends to be.
He would have never become what he is today if Tony Schwartz, a liberal, hadn’t ghostwritten the Art of the Deal.
Furthermore, Trump would have never become the 45th President of the United States of America without the support of the ‘activist republicans’. The ones convinced that Roe vs Wade must be reversed. At all costs.
The ones convinced, just like the ‘liberals’ are, that they ‘know better’.
And, by the way, this is a fake.
Something that Orwell would have agreed upon but was never actually written by him.
“As a man thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.”
James Allen
Sometime ago – more than 45 years, when food was still plentiful in communist Romania – I heard for the first time that ‘many people dig their graves with their teeth’.
I was too young to understand the deeper meaning of this. That sooner or later each of us will meet the consequences of our previous decisions.
15 years ago I read a book written when I was a toddler. Almost 60 years ago.
The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann.
Nowadays, the social media is full of messages stating that the posters actually don’t care about what other people think of them.
What happened to “society is, in fact, habit”?
Have we become self-sufficient enough to live, each of us, on their own?
Really?
Do we really think like this?
Cocky enough to give the finger to everybody else?
Don’t we realize that we’re building a new pattern here? A new habit?
Will our children say that we’ve built the hell they’ll be living in by carelessly talking about it?
After all, the most dangerous enemy is that who worms its way from within.
Conceit cannot be survived!
“Propaganda machines give too much power to symbols;
they tell you the confederate flag is offensive!”
The fact that propaganda machines give too much power to symbols doesn’t mitigate the fact that some people find that flying the confederate flag is intended as an offense.
On the contrary, actually!
For something to become a resource, it has to be identified first. As such…
Coming back to Kissinger, we need first to accept that he is the product of the world before him and one of the factors who continues to shape the current one.
We can learn from him – and coldly assess the present situation in order to avoid past mistakes going forward – or … we can let him win! And follow in his footsteps: Divide et impera, manipulate people into doing things against their own nature, despise everybody who thinks differently than what we consider to be right …
“To set a wolf to guard sheep“
Latin proverb.
A first glance, it doesn’t make much sense to put an oilman in charge of a COP conference.
Nothing more than setting a wolf to guard sheep, right?
On the other hand, shepherd dogs are nothing but ‘converted’ wolves.
Wolves who had somehow figured out that it’s more sustainable to live with the humans than in the wild.
Former wolves who had somehow figured out that’s far more sustainable – for them, to protect the sheep than to prey on them.
OK, the agent driving the process had been human. But the facts remain. Dogs have evolved from wolves.
What are we waiting for?
If the descendants of the wolves had been able to ‘cross over’, why so many reasonable people continue to believe that the ‘Global Warming’ is a hoax?
After all, we’re the ones supposed to be reasonable…
And the way I see it, it’s unreasonable to believe that burning fossil fuel accumulated during millions of years can be ‘sustainable’. Forget about ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak gas’ and remember how hot the Earth was when the first drop of fossil fuel had been set aside by Mother Nature.
