Let’s Get Real

Pop Quiz

What author wrote: “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”?

What author said: “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”?

What philosopher said: “Study the past if you would define the future.”?

What author wrote: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”?

What science fiction writer observed: “Reality denied comes back to haunt.”?

What political activist said: “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”?

Answers at the end of this post.

The last post begs the question: How do we explain the ignorant, narcissistic behavior of the young people who seem incapable of dealing with the reality into which they have been thrust? The answer may be in the question itself. Is it the real world that humanity has had to deal with for thousands of years or have we given them no context with which to understand the world as it actually exists?

Most young people are so vainglorious that they believe that all history begins on the date they were born. The establishment has created a controlled reality that is without historical context. A Ministry of Truth (MOT), comprised of the 24/7 news media, newspapers and the omnipresent social media, Twitter BM (Before Musk), YouTube, Facebook and Google) sanitize the flow of any information that might challenge this controlled reality. The public education system and de-education camps, aka the colleges and universities, work to shape the controlled reality. An entrenched government bureaucracy ensures that nothing is done to compromise the controlled reality. The ruling class/establishment demands the centralization of power in Washington based on the fears that are a key component of this new reality. Any arguments or data that challenge the Federal monolith are labeled misinformation or disinformation and all dissenting voices are silenced. If the power structure can shape the reality they control the people.

This was the central premise of Orwell’s novel 1984. Big Brother controlled reality. The Party that ruled Oceania famously manipulated the language: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength. The protagonist Winston Smith, who harbors revolutionary dreams, is threatened unless he agrees that 2 + 2 = 5. Smith finally agrees and embraces Big Brother.

Is the comparison to 1984 hyperbole? Keep reading…

Education

The schools do not teach the factual history of our country and the world. Students are rather taught that the history of the world is an uninterrupted procession of racism, exploitation, oppression and corruption. As such they have no comprehension of the progress that humankind has seen over the past two millennia. Deirdre McCloskey has authored a brilliant trilogy, Bourgeois Virtue, Bourgeois Equality and Bourgeois Dignity, which makes clear the events that have led to the betterment of the world. Sadly students no longer read history. Most rely on Wikipedia which is regularly amended and is written with a strong establishment tilt. Modern textbooks are being edited to support the controlled reality that is in full agreement with the government approved zeitgeist. The result is an uncritical and gullible population that cannot think critically because it has been fed a steady diet of propaganda. A few examples will suffice…

Climate Change

There has been no open, critical debate of the climate issue for decades. The MOT, public education and the Federal bureaucracy simply state, as an immutable truth, that human activity has created a so-called climate “crisis”. Over the past 100,000 years there have been numerous cycles of warming and cooling that were naturally occurring events. In the 1970’s the CIA warned that the greatest natural disaster would be another Pleistocene ice age during which there was 5,000 feet of ice on Albany, New York. Today young people think the Ice Age is a full length cartoon movie. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is content to sentence the poorest areas of the world to lives of poverty and misery. This goes unchallenged because it is part of the controlled reality.

Building a Controlled Reality

Today young people are fed a steady diet of video games which involve incredible amounts of visual violence. No wonder there are shootings from coast to coast involving teenage killers and teenage victims, predominantly VOC’s…Victims of Color. The addicted video players have learned that violence is just a game. The violence and killing in Chicago each weekend (April 15-16 2023: 35 shot, 8 killed) is studiously ignored by the MOT, local politicians and, most interestingly, by (Some) Black Lives Matter. The controlled reality blames this on systemic racism (which they cannot define), lack of gun control and the police. The police are routinely referred to as descendants of the slave patrols that were part of the Democrat culture in the antebellum South. There is little or no interest in exploring other causes for the anarchy in our cities. Based on the controlled reality, systemic racism, is blindly accepted.

We can no longer define either of the two genders. Transgender ideology permeates our culture and is “taught” in our elementary schools. There is no effort to understand the impacts of this destructive ideology. There have been a number violent acts by individuals who self-identify as transgender. Why? We are told that there is a significant level of criminal violence directed toward transgender people yet the crime statistics show that there is a vanishingly small number of such crimes. Is it possible that the medical process for transitioning is the problem? No matter, the young people blindly accept this as reality.

The youth of America, because they have not been taught history and therefore do not understand the people and events that shaped the world as we know it, are unable to appreciate the progress that we have made over the last 500 years. In the West slavery is a thing of the past, our standard of living has risen dramatically and disease and starvation are rare in areas where cheap energy is readily available. Cancer is predominantly a disease of old age…the median age at the time of diagnosis is 66 years. Life expectancy has risen from 39.4 years in 1860, to 78.9 years in 2020. These data are driven, in large part, by the lifestyle improvements made possible by the use of fossil fuels to provide cheap energy. Yet we hear from the benighted youth rioting across the country or attacking anyone with whom they disagree…that summer is global warming, that roads are designed by racists (ask Mayor Pete, the poster child for someone educated far beyond their intelligence) and that men can have babies despite lacking the required biological infrastructure. The new Mayor of Chicago, who will soon have us longing for the return of Lori Lightweight, offered the following steaming pile of naivete: “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” What a wonderful way to excuse anarchy! And by the way who has “starved” Black youth of opportunity? The Mayor’s Democrat Party.

So we have inculcated a generation with this new controlled reality and have stigmatized any effort to show that the emperor’s reality has no substance. One has only to observe the Keystone Cops that comprise the Biden administration…assuming of course that the MOT and the education establishment will let such an observation take place.

There will be more to follow on this topic.

Pop Quiz answers:

What author wrote: “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”? Aldous Huxley

What author said: “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”? Michael Crichton, visionary author of State of Fear

What philosopher said: “Study the past if you would define the future.”? Confucius

What author wrote: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”? Eric Blair

What science fiction writer observed: “Reality denied comes back to haunt.”? Philip Dick

What political activist said: “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”? Elie Wiesel