Believe and Disbelieve Nothing

I haven’t been posting here lately, but I’ve been writing on five subjects and will post up the final pieces some time in the next week or so. Over the holidays, I’m juggling writing and work, but the work is soon to end so I’ll have more time to spend here.

In one piece, I share a few thoughts on the old claim that “history is written by the victors,” and the lengths these so-called victors will go to to maintain that advantage in a world which is rapidly changing.

In another, I go into a bit more detail about what I mean when I say “language of thinking.” I then use the framework I lay down to explore how different languages of thinking encourage and discourage different states of mind and entertaining different trains of thinking, and how this might be being used by our institutions and wider cultures to prevent people exploring certain concepts and disciplines. This will likely turn into the beginning of a short 3-part series or something, rather than being its own self-contained piece.

Algorithms

I used to be able to keyword-search my way to some very particular results. Sometimes I searched for things with varying levels of complexity, like using multiple specific keywords to pull two bits of information from the summary of one result.

Now, I get this feeling of being defeated before I even type anything in to the search box.

I’ve found myself primarily using Telegram Messenger for certain news and social commentary for two main reasons. First is that I can be sure that I’m making the fully informed choice to click on to those channels, rather than being served up some kind of algorithmic distraction from what I want to see. Second, it’s near-impossible these days to find raw footage on certain news stories on sites like Youtube. Instead, I get spammed with results from their “trusted sources” or “authoritative sources” or whatever it is, like CNN, MSNBC, The BBC, etc. If they ever show raw footage, it’s usually chopped up and spoken over.

The levels of corruption can be maddening, and this clown world both shocks and disturbs me pretty much daily. Perhaps I need a break from keeping up with certain information, what the so-called “leaders” are up to, how people are reacting to them and all that.

Who knows? It might not be possible to counter our failed self-appointed leaders… but we can render them glaringly obsolete if we choose to. It might just happen inadvertently in the face of emerging technology and education.

But, seeing as we’re stuck with them for now, and also to keep the futurist in my brain silent for a minute, I have been thinking it might be time to write up a new “code” or set of standards for these leaders; something akin to The Constitution of The United States, but that could apply pretty much anywhere regardless of political or other ideological differences. Something that doesn’t allow them to detach from those they claim to represent, lead, or whatever else. Something that doesn’t allow them to see populations as just numbers.

As a philosopher, or some kind of serious-minded person who has dedicated a lot of their time, energy and life to the search for wisdom and truth, one of the most constant yet sporadic challenges you might face over the years is being discouraged from pursuing your interests by other people.

You’ll have people half-heartedly try to engage you in discussion, and, when it doesn’t work out as they’d hoped, they’ll tell you that you take things too seriously, or that you need to chill out, or that happiness won’t be attained that way, etc.

Here, it’s important to be able to spot the difference between someone saying that genuinely, and someone saying it as a reaction to you either exhausting them or running circles round them.

When I was younger, I had some troubles understanding the nature of systems. Before I started to look, the world was just “as it is,” and I had no understanding about the technical and conceptual foundations some systems are built on.

I was one of these people who started to take interest and learn about things only after I accepted the notion that I’d been lied to, and that the worldview that had been handed to me up until then was a composite of those lies. This led me down quite a confusing and self-destructive path, as, in an effort to re-educate and recondition myself after unlearning a lot of the social/cultural nonsense, I was in the habit of tearing down definitions and boundaries in my own head.

This was necessary at the time, for example, to do away with all that I’d been told about who I was and what was expected of me, what duties I was expected to fulfil, etc. I couldn’t have redefined and rediscovered myself as an individual without doing that.

Boards of Canada – One Very Important Thought Lyrics

Now that the show is over, and we have jointly exercised our constitutional rights, we would like to leave you with one very important thought:

Some time in the future, you may have the opportunity to serve as a juror in a censorship case or a so-called obscenity case

Since the Covid pandemic, what I call “Misinformation Hysteria” has made its way into the minds of huge numbers of people across the West, so-much-so that I’ve had multiple people tell me that “misinformation” is as big of a threat to humanity as nuclear war. And because this sounds to me like something that Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum might want to have people repeating, I have to spend some time examining it and detailing my position.

When it comes to defining misinformation, I keep it simple: claims that are wrong. Currently, the socially-accepted definition of misinformation actually confuses matters as there’s no clear distinction between someone being genuinely mistaken and someone deceptively spreading false information.

As for false information that has been spread deceptively, I’ll keep that simple too and continue to just call them “lies”, and I consider it a mistake to broaden the abstraction by referring to them as misinformation because, suddenly, the line between a liar and someone who’s just wrong becomes very thin and easy to misinterpret. This can be dangerous in a world where people are punished for what they say and think.