Plato's Cave: What Lia Thomas and Covid have in common

Sunday, April 10, 2022

What Lia Thomas and Covid have in common

A few weeks ago this email rolled in. The writer is a graduate school professor who has been on Team Reality from the start. About half the class laughed out loud.

ORIGINAL LINK

Quotes (More)

“Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”

- Attributed to Nietzsche but actually anonymous

“The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

“Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Humans are storytelling creatures, so whoever can control the stories the humans are telling themselves about what’s going on in the world has a great deal of control over the humans. Our mental chatter tends to dominate such a large percentage of our existence that if it can be controlled the controller can exert a tremendous amount of influence over the way we think, act, and vote.

“The powerful understand this, while the general public mostly does not. That’s all we’ve been seeing in these attempts to regulate ideas and information as human communication becomes more and more rapid and networked. An entire oligarchic empire is built on the ability to prevent us from realizing at mass scale that that empire does not serve us and inflicts great evil upon our world. The question of whether our species can awaken to its highest potential or not boils down to whether our dominators will succeed in locking down our minds, or if we will find some way to break free.”

- Caitlin Johnstone

“...this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.”

- Bari Weiss

“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”

- Søren Kierkegaard

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

- George Orwell, 1984

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

“It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

- Samuel Adams

“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and the trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, the wrong the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”

- James Fenimore Cooper

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid … Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

- Bertrand Russell

“The reasoning for this is not too difficult to apprehend; school, as we plainly call it, is an institution that has historically been put in place to ultimately serve the wants of the ruling class, not the common people.

“In order for the so-called elite to maintain their lavish lifestyles of overt luxury — where they contribute the least but enjoy the most — they understand that children must be dumbed down and brainwashed to accept (and even serve) their rapacious system of artificial scarcity, unending exploitation, and incessant war.”

- Gavin Nascimento

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

- Charles MacKay

“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”

- Ayn Rand

“Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.”

- Jonathan Swift

“Mass insanity comes from the denial of what everyone knows is true.”

- Charles Eisenstein

“We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability.”

- Bonhoeffer

“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.”

- Joseph Goebbels

“The first principle of non-violent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating.”

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ – this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

- Aldous Huxley

“We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters, wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous.”

- Hans Von Hentig

Quotes

“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”

- Plato

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”

- Unknown

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

- Martin Niemöller

“The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom.”

- Voltaire

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

- Voltaire

“A 'conspiracy theory’ is something that, if true, you couldn’t handle it.”

- Mark Crispin Miller

“The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country.”

- Albert Camus

“So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood—of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies—or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.”

- A. Solzhenitsyn

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

- Mark Twain

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

- H.L. Menken

“'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded -- and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency persists.”

- F. A. Hayek

“Countless, similar stories across thousands of years of human history point to this simple conclusion: the people in charge don’t always tell the truth. Duh. Is that really a controversial statement?”

- Simon Black

“Despite appearances, Covid has not been the end of democracy. It has merely revealed that we were already not in a democracy. It showed where the power really is and how easily the facade of freedom could be stripped from us. It showed that we were free only at the pleasure of elite institutions. By our ready acquiescence, it showed us something about ourselves. We were already unfree. We were already conditioned to submission...”

- Charles Eisenstein

“Complaining about the existence of conspiracy theories is power-serving behavior. Instead, complain about the existence of government, corporate and financial secrecy which causes people to form speculative theories about what the powerful are up to behind that veil of opacity.

“They concentrate all the power in these tiny little elitist circles, then say 'You don’t get to know what we’re doing with all our power over here. Not only that, but you don’t even get to talk to each other about what we might be doing, even though it could directly affect you.

“How crazy is that? At the very least don’t play along with them and police each other about it on top of that.

“It’s fine to discuss and debate the validity of individual theories (I do it all the time), but to complain about the fact that people form theories about possible conspiracies when we know for a fact that powerful people conspire is just infantile.”

- Caitlin Johnston

“And wouldn’t they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?”

- Socrates

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

- Gustav Le Bon

“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. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

- Edward L. Bernays

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

- Theodore Dalrymple

“The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found.”

- Allan Bloom

“In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”

- James Fenimore Cooper

“Advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government ... will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.”

- Bertrand Russell

“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.”

- Donald James aka Dresden James

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

- H.L. Menken

“The contemplation of things as they are without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.”

- Francis Bacon

Plato's Cave

Sunday, April 10, 2022

What Lia Thomas and Covid have in common

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