“I know what you’re thinking, ’cause right now I’m thinking the same thing. Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here: Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill?” – The Matrix
When I was a kid, I could walk into a 7-Eleven with just a dollar and walk out with a six pack of pop and three candy bars. Now? They have cameras everywhere.
I write a lot about the Truth, but I think the Friday before Memorial Day is a fine time to talk about the Truth in general. Why? Because I said so.
The first thing I want to point out is that a quest for Truth, does not mean everything is bright and happy and puppy tails. The Truth is, very often a grim thing. I have found things sometimes aren’t the happy web that I imagined. Like the Wedding Guest in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I ended up being “A sadder and a wiser man” because of The Truth. I guess the Wedding Guest’s bright spot is at least Iron Maiden® wrote a song about him.
That is part of the issue of looking for the Truth – I thought I understood life, and then a curve ball hits. Some people call this sudden exposure to the Truth: The Red Pill, based on the red Reese’s Pieces that E.T.® ate with Indiana Jones™ in the movie Jaws.
Or something like that. Heck, I used to worry about the evidence that the Sun’s neutrino count was half of what would be expected, and that maybe its internal fusion had stopped. But that was just too scary, so now I worry about celebrity gossip.
What was Otto von Bismark’s favorite Queen song? Under Prussia.
The Red Pill is choosing to see reality as it is, not as we’d wish it to be. In this quest, I’ve seen things I didn’t want to see, and understood things often people are willfully ignorant of because the consequences of the Truth are . . . disturbing.
That’s difficult, because then I have to go back through what I formerly believed to be True, and reassess – how does this new Truth change what I thought I knew? What else do I think to be True that is similarly wrong? What I trusted as the Truth, after taking the Red Pill, I had to reassess and review my whole worldview through different eyes.
One of my first Red Pills was when I was a sophomore in college. I realized then that most people simply didn’t care about me, didn’t care if I succeeded or failed, and that the majority of my presence in the world was like that of a finger in a cup of water – pull the finger out, and two seconds later you’d never know a finger had ever been in the water. Unless I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom.
There are several things still functioning on the Titanic, for instance, the sinks still hold water.
And, it’s True. Most of the journey of most lives is shared with just a few very close people. I remember that one of my friends died not too long after high school – a car crash. I hadn’t seen him for four years afterwards, and was sad, but, you know, I shrugged and moved on.
That’s not the case for everyone – families are much tighter, obviously, but lots of marriages are transactional: it’s based not on a bond, but on a transaction, like nearly every Hollywood marriage.
But it comes down to friendships, too. I once had a close friend at work. I left the job, and boom, the friendship status was closed. Our relationship had been a transaction, and it occurred in an artificial setting. Didn’t mean I wasn’t irritated, but, hey, like Mark Twain said, Red Pill is gonna Red Pill.
She said, “Strip down, facing me.” It wasn’t until the McDonald’s® cashier screamed that I figured out she meant my credit card.
Searching for the Truth isn’t about avoiding ugliness, searching for the Truth is about being able to make actual choices, using free will free of illusions. It’s about making actual conscious moral decisions without pretending. This is better, even if the Truth is ugly.
Why? Decisions made with the Truth in mind work out better. If I tried to use reason and logic with a toddler, we’d both end up frustrated and I’d end up with a black eye and a fractured clavicle. Again.
That’s a key problem with making decisions or basing reality on anything other than the Truth: “solutions” won’t solve any problems if they’re not based on reality except by accident. Those “solutions” may even make things worse. For instance, if the problem is youth crime, and New York City decides that to stop youth crime, for any crime short of murder, they’re going to ignore it and put the criminal back on the streets immediately, what will happen?
For illegal aliens, if the policy to stop those illegals is to fund them to get to the border, bus them from the border to relocation centers, feed, clothe, fund, and then fly for free to yet more free stuff: housing and food. How many illegals will that policy stop?
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.
The True solution to a problem often requires a True understanding of the problem. In the examples above, the True problem isn’t the illegals or the young criminals, the True problem is the GloboLeftElite who want the illegal aliens and the youthful criminals to be doing exactly what they’re doing.
Not using the Truth to make decisions when you have it is morally and ethically bankrupt, and the GloboLeftElite and their stooges have a lot to answer for.
The biggest ally I have in my search for the Truth is humility, which is probably one of the best inventions, ever. Although I’ve learned a lot, the best lesson I’ve ever learned is that I can be 100% dead wrong. Because of that history, I always, always try to ask myself, “what if I’m wrong?”
It’s a powerful question. If everybody is doing the same thing, and I do something different, what happens if I’m wrong? What’s the upside if I’m right? We live in a world of uncertainty, and finding Truth is not always clear. It’s True that the dollar will eventually go to zero, but it’s also True that I could go broke waiting for that to happen.
So, I try to seek whatever evidence I can to help me. I also like to use those close friends (and The Mrs.) as people to help point out when I’m delusional. They try, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes I’m right. By writing these points down in the posts I’ve put out, I’ve also made it so it’s harder to delude myself that I knew better than I really did.
Just kidding.
I’m really hoping this isn’t a spoiler for you Civil War buffs.
The reward, though, is to live a life where you’re guided not by delusion, but by Truth. It may not always be the happiest outcome, but it is the real outcome. Or if that’s too scary, I’ll just concentrate on whatever Taylor Swift is doing instead.
Stupid neutrinos.
Alcohol is not the solution.
It is a solvent.
But what you buy at the liquor store is a solution, since it is an alcohol-water mixture if it isn’t 200 proof. If you want pure alcohol, you need to get it from someone who supplies chemistry labs.
Do chem labs have black and white coats?
Yup, it is. Mine is usually in beer form.
And you cannot have a solution, unless you are fully dissolved in the solvent.
And Mark Twain said that willpower lasts about two weeks, and is generally soluble in alcohol.
And all of Biden’s solutions are the same as the solving for x in this equation: x²+1=0
She said, “Strip down, facing me.”
That’s funny because it is so true. Card readers are becoming like snowflakes in that every single one is unique in how it operates. Are the credit card readers just randomly changing their setup to mess with our heads? Or maybe just to give the cashiers some entertainment to help pass the time?
Walgreens recently switched to a card reader that requires you to now tap or insert the card upside down. Who in their right mind would design something so non-intuitive for consumers??? Go to a different store and you have to hold the card at a completely different angle. No two readers are alike. I fully expect to walk into a store any day now and be told to stand on one leg in order to complete a purchase.
Saw a movie with one of those old imprinting machines. The good old days.
Trying hard to remember who said it, or where i read it (possibly here ?), but ive always tried to live by a simple maxim…’You must accept the truth as you find it, not as you wish it to be.’
It’s a good razor to use. Let’s call it Anon’s Razor.
Jesus Christ is Truth…and is the only entity in this universe that will neither leave or forsake you.
Amen.
Yes, when I feel alone, it is Him who went away.
I used to think that GloboHomo couldn’t be soooo stoopid. Until the realizatilon slapped me in the face that things are going just as they planned.
Tree Mike
Yup, that’s the scary part. I put my (weak sauce) faith in Murphy disliking them more than us.
Yup. Funny, isn’t it?
This brings to mind a quote from Edward Abbey “Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion”. It has been my experience that most truth is indeed harsh and cruel but as I have written, that is really the essence of dissident politics: dealing with the world as it is, not as you wish it were. It is also why I walked away from organized religion, even though it was comforting it wasn’t true no matter how much I wished it were.
Same here, I’m guessing it was the hypocrisy of Churchianity that was the problem.
You two gentlemen have made a critical error. Christianity is not yourself and some group, it is between a man and his Maker. It is a relationship between Jesus Christ and a man, not sausage and pancakes.
Read the Book, don’t let someone read it for you.
It is as it is. It all starts from that.
I was a Captain in the military during the Bosnian war (See “Wag the Dog”). Part of my mission was recon and documentation of certain nastiness committed by the Serbs – and In other places by the Bosnians. On completing a sortie, we would collect information and the SCIF, send the classified reports to the Pentagram, and the sanitized versions to Public Affairs to give to the MSM. Not long after starting this, we would be watching CNN (back when we thought it was legit) and they would start talking about “events” that were happening in Bosnia. We would hear these reports and look at each other in puzzlement – we hadn’t heard anything about what they were “reporting”. Nowhere in the intel that we had did these events occur – nor could anyone confirm them – and they were ignoring or spinning what WAS happening – if they reported on it at all. After a few days of this, it hit me like a brick: *They’re making it all up!* I was so shocked that they could lie so openly. Now I’m shocked that I was so gullible for so long. At that point, I realized that they could have been lying about EVERYTHING – so I wiped all of what I thought I “knew” off the table and started over again – going all the way back to the Revolutionary War – and a bit before that. I took the Red Pill in the early 90’s. I studied mostly primary-source history. My world view is dramatically different than most people’s world view because most people believe complete BS when it comes to real history. Spoiler alert: if it’s “mainstream” it’s more than likely overwhelmingly wrong. This also explains why high school and beyond history is so freakin’ boring – because regime milquetoast soi boi “historians” have sanitized it – and they completely lack imagination. They don’t want people learning from the past.
Even if CNN had talked to you beforehand, it would still end up being mostly fabricated. Journalists moved away from just reporting the facts, to “creating a story”. I remember talking to a newspaper reporter when I was in high school. Did a 10 minute interview, checked the paper a few days later and voila, the story reported was completely different than what I said. The writer had shifted things around and completely changed the context. I realized then that if they could do that to something so mundane as a story about a high school student, that I shouldn’t believe anything being reported.
>My world view is dramatically different than most people’s world view
Has this affected your personal and professional lives? I’m in the position of being surrounded by good blue hive academics. Decent people for the most part, but they strongly believe in just about everything they hear from the mainstream infotainment complex. I don’t go about making a big deal about it, but plenty of people know that I’m a “heretic”. Somehow we get along. Mostly. Lately I’ve noticed cracks in the solidarity, mostly over the trans business. Particularly when it pertains to their kids.
And thank you for your comment. Elsewhere, and in another context (“treatment” of opioid addiction) I wrote: Yet another thing where it looks like we were fed BS under the warm glow of gaslighting. Is there ANYTHING official we’ve been taught or told by “authority” that is NOT a lie?
So far as history goes, it’s been rewritten, and as you say, outright fabricated, over and over to serve various interests. Not all of which are aligned. In the West in general, and the US in particular, it looks to me as if history’s been slanted the most toward a group that is fascinating in that the individuals are largely neurotic, but collectively, as a people, they are incredibly narcissistic. We as a nation and as individuals (mostly) are making judgements and decisions based on incredibly flawed information. Frankly it’s beyond sad and downright terrifying.
We bombed Serbian Christians, for the muslim Croatisn SS. And as far as I heard the mass graves supposedly murdered by the Serbs were never found
That backs up other sources. Bosnia was a real Red Pill for me, since the Op Eds were filled with all the hot button comments to make people want war. I wasn’t there, but that was purely a geopolitical power play.
I’ve come to believe that if the government says it, we really can’t believe it.
For the record, don’t worry about the solar neutrino problem. The Sun has enough hydrogen fuel for another literal billion years before it goes into an unavoidable brightening and boils the oceans here on Earth.
Honestly, nobody has worried about solar neutrinos for the past 20 years since the 2002 Nobel Prize was awarded for figuring out what was going on.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/themes/solving-the-mystery-of-the-missing-neutrinos/
Who could have guessed that the solution was that neutrinos were actually fat trannies? They have mass and the oscillate between three types – electron, muon and tau. Neither fact was expected, and led the 2015 Nobel Prize. Truth is weird.
TL:DR: “About 100 billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through your thumbnail every second, but you do not feel them because they interact so rarely and so weakly with matter.”
Told ya truth was weird.
And neutrinos get even weirder. Like the concept of neutrino poisoning.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
One of my favorite of his.
yeah, but are those tranny neutrinos going to start identifying as a proton? If so, that is when things will get ugly.
Neutrinos identifying as protons would be even worse than the mass hysteria of “dogs and cats living together” in Ghostbusters. Neutrinos are leptons, protons are hadrons. Leptons (as far as we know) cannot be divided. Protons are made of three bound quarks.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-map-of-the-standard-model-of-particle-physics-20201022/
There are still some deep, dark mysteries in the Standard Model of particle physics, perhaps things humanity would be better off not knowing. I can’t believe I said that, I must be getting old. But it’s worth remembering that Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932, got the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1935, and in less than ten years there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese flash fried to death and we’ve been worried about a nuclear apocalypse ever since. Sadly, more so lately.
One interesting thing about particle physics that could lead beyond the Standard Model is the Koide Formula. This is too much of a coincidence not to be Something Really Fundamentally Important.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/could-this-40-year-old-formula-be-the-key-to-going-beyond-the-standard-model/
https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1201.2067
I always thought Higgs was the Bo’son on the Lusitania.
So, I have a sinking feeling after reading that article. s/
I know, but it’s such a funny line.
“Truth is usually scoffed at; illusion is usually king, but in the battle for Western Civilization it’s going to be reality and not illusion or delusion that will determine what the future will bring.”
The late Dr. Stan Montieth
Sounds like a guy I’d like to have a beer with.
The truth is the worst tasting medicine ever taken, strains the heart, and the side-effects are sometimes worse than the condition before it was taken. It takes strength to endure, and the strongest of resolves to not allow it to destroy your soul.
Very well said.
John, this is one of the reason I continue to buy up as many of the Classical Greek and Roman texts as 1) I can afford; and 2) My wife tolerates it. I fear all of this – the basis of Classical Studies and that truth – is truly in danger of being lost.
I’ve got . . . a LOT of books. Hopefully we never make a world where people are no longer interested in reading them.