Bahs

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I have long been interested in the way in which uncritical belief comes so easily to people. One accepts this tendency in young children as understandable. It is not so easy to accept once they reach the age of 11-12 years.

The beliefs held uncritically by the great majority of adults boggle the mind and suggest that their minds long ago became stuck, like the stylus on an old vinyl record, at a rather primitive level of development and that they continue to go round and round in the same groove, never progressing in their capacities for both critical rational thinking and intuitive, synthetic thought. In contrast to the former linear thought process, the nonlinear, intuitive process allows one to see how the individual interlocking pieces of a puzzle fit together to form a bigger picture.

Believing in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Good Fairy fits into the child’s undeveloped consciousness without much chafing. However, believing in the infallibility of one’s physician, dentist, government leader, priest, pastor, guru, or religious text, does not fit at all comfortably into the awareness of a fully developed adult unless that person has unconsciously forsaken individual, human freedom and the capacity for reasoned, informed choice.

The rational mind in isolation, even if used critically, is inadequate to the tasks of veridical perception and constructive thought. The intuitive, synthesizing mind easily apprehends what fits and what doesn’t fit into a meaningful view of the world and particular circumstances.

Not being inclined to engage in partisan politics, nonetheless, in 2000, during the election campaign, I cringed at the thought of the Republicans’ nominating an individual for the Presidency of the United States who was demonstratively a spoiled, perpetual adolescent as well as being an unrecovered alcoholic. In conjunction with these facts, my further knowledge of the tainted, interlocking histories of the Bush and Walker families led, naturally, to the prediction that the Presidency of George W. Bush (GWB) would be a disaster for this country.

I mean, let’s get real. Would you entrust your cherished, diligently maintained automobile to a "dry," but not sober, alcoholic while you went on vacation for two weeks? Why then give control of your government to such an individual to drive potentially recklessly and impulsively for 208 or 416 weeks in an insatiable quest for power and approval to bolster his inadequate ego?

Thus, as 9/11 became a stimulus for the erosion of liberty in America and words such as “Homeland Security” and the “Patriot Act” began to be used, harkening back to the use of similar terms in pre-Nazi Germany, I began to be concerned about what appeared to be an insidious march toward a totalitarian state.

The subsequent prosecution of war in Afghanistan, the pre-emptive war in Iraq, and the eventual uncovering of the lies that led us into these wars confirmed my earlier misgivings about the character of GWB, and I began to pay attention to the concerns of the many people who were questioning the official story of 9/11 and running into stonewalling at virtually every juncture. I also began to become aware of the many pieces of the puzzle that did not fit together and in fact seemed to be parts of an entirely different puzzle.

My interest now has evolved to the intuitive knowing that something is drastically rotten, not in Denmark, but in America. And, I am deeply concerned about the future of the American Democracy, if something is not done to prevent the indoctrination of the populace to accept Fascist ideas uncritically without even being aware that they are becoming indoctrinated.

Those who wish to manipulate and control people play upon the human vulnerability of believing uncritically and assimilating such beliefs unconsciously until they operate as parts of the mind’s autopilot. People are generally incredibly susceptible to allowing their autopilots to control their behavior. Little of what the average person does is a result of a truly, free, conscious decision. Generally, the programmed promptings of one’s past experience that have become distilled into unquestioned beliefs leads one to "react" without thinking rather than to "respond" with thoughtful apprehension of a situation.

If people so easily relinquish conscious, volitional control of their lives to an automated part of their minds, how difficult would it be for those who seek power and dominion over the world to gain control of these individual autopilots which in many ways already operate according to common programs, i.e., “groupthink?” Not difficult at all as illustrated in the following.

The British woman interviewed by Alex Jones in his documentary "Terrorstorm" shortly after the London bombings on 7/7/05 dramatically illustrates another feature of the automated, mental process of the person infected by totalitarian propaganda, a process which George Orwell called “doublethink.” The incredible conclusion of this interview still rings in my mind. When asked why she supposed that the police shot John Charles De Menezes, a young Brazilian electrician, purportedly presumed to be a terrorist, eight times in the head [it later turned out to be 10 shots at point blank range], she replied, “Oh...I don’t know. That is a lot of times to shoot him. It is a lot of times to shoot him.” Then, she went on to say unflinchingly, “I still believe that there should be a shoot to kill policy. I still believe, personally, but that’s my view, you know.” And, then the video cuts to her concluding, disturbing statement, “I think people should give up their liberty for freedom.”

If one examines the notion of giving up liberty for freedom, the underlying psychological meaning of this belief seems reasonably clear. The woman espousing this belief is apparently saying that she is willing to give up liberty to ensure that she is free from the fear of terrorism, without realizing that this trade-off is far more terrifying in the long run than the immediate fear that she is avoiding.

For me, the foregoing interview succinctly represents the critical crisis that we presently face. If individuals cannot be helped to assume volitional control of their lives by taking themselves off autopilot, then we all will fall slowly, imperceptibly, victim to efforts toward totalitarian domination, one person at a time. If I can’t help you remain uninfected by viral, fascist thinking, then I am one person closer to having my liberty ripped from my grasp, because soon we will reach critical mass in which there is no longer the power in numbers necessary to prevent a totalitarian takeover of our lives.

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