The Myth of Truth, and How Liars Use It.

Continually, I hear people say they have not way to know what’s really going on in or with the nation, because “you can’t trust the media.”

No, you sure can’t. On any given night of watching television news, you will hear so much statistical nonsense, so much specious reasoning, and so much downright obvious lying, that little of what is said can be used by anyone rational as the basis of an opinion or action. It’s the pits.

But you can learn a lot otherwise about the nation from the boob tube, a whole lot. I’m not sure how I learned the science of news-watching, but I know how it started. I was still a kid in high school when I acquired my curiosity about the way the media reported the news. Beginning with a supposedly crying statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a place called Nasita, Wisconsin, I traveled to the site and scene of events reported in the papers and on the radio, to see what the truth was. The experience was not only something fascinating, it was enlightening.

There is something in the human being that does not like reality, the truth. A human being will believe something on the basis of evidence so flimsy as to beggar description. Usually, in that case, he believes simply and solely because he wants the thing to be true; often, matter of fact, that is the only reason for his believing. On the other hand, if a fact goes against his desires, he will simply refuse to believe on the same grounds – he doesn’t want it to be that way. That’s against even overwhelming evidence.

Discovering that made another observation all the more amazing, that man chooses to believe that truth always succeeds, that it is somehow endowed by the creator with irresistible power. He will defend his creed against reality, no matter what happens to refute it.

There is a corollary, the fact that human beings fear their own thoughts more than they fear anything else on earth. I’ve wasted more time, I think, on conversation examining and probing for reason this should be true than any other diversion save, perhaps, judo. It’s been a study, matter of fact, as intensive as that having to do with the media and its version of the truth.
Man fears his own thoughts more than financial ruin, more than ridicule – and that may be what thinking amounts to for many – and more than death. Thought, after all, is liable to discover the truth he hates. It may also discover that what he believes is nonsense. Thought is merciless to things like politics, personal philosophy, religion, and mythology. Thought doesn’t give a damn for authority or privilege. It’s devastating to ego. It’s liable to screw up you love life, too.

Apparently that has always been so, but people nowadays go even to such lengths as mind-altering drugs to avoid hearing themselves think. Living during the Presidential Administration of George W. Bush is enough to do that to a lot of people.

Anyway, my penchant for analyzing news data and the media grew to swiftly apparent and so early that my high school class prophecy was that I would one day find and capture the Abominable Snowman. I’m still at it. Using my methods, a visitor from another planet might quickly understand a great deal about, and know what to expect of, the United States, just by watching television for a couple of hours.

The visitor would see readily that commerce, money and wealth, are an obsession nothing can abate. No matter the entertainment or educational value of programming, it is interrupted every five minutes or less by at least the same amount of advertising and commercial “messages.” With the exception of local commercials, the advertising is of far higher quality and “production value” than the “regular” programming – entertainment, news, or the like. The wonder, and another clue concerning the aversion toward thought the viewing audience suffers from, is that anyone of normal – and I mean by that behaviorally un-altered - intellect can be enticed into watching.

Provided even basic understanding of behavioral psychology like that of operant conditioning, no unbiased and dispassionate observer can fail to see the behavioral propagandist component of everything presented by the screen. Currently, for instance, the method in vogue is what I call the “Mutt and Jeff,” routine. The public is – has been convinced – by relentless application of an old Josef Goebbels technique, that of the big lie, and another credited to Vladimir Lenin, the of the lie repeated often enough, that certain stereotypes exist. In this stereotypical construct, one the mind unwilling to accept what it is uncomfortable with – meaning it must think about it, every viewpoint is liberal or conservative. A world not black or white, good or evil, clear or obscure, is unacceptable – too provocative of thought.

A mind so addled is easily manipulated. While I was growing up, the Catholic Church – of which I was an innocent and fleetingly naive member – candidly stated the purpose and intent of its insistence in a “Catholic Education.” The Church knew, and taught as dogma – lest anyone stop to think - that early indoctrination of children was the key to making them behaviorally dependent upon church doctrine. The doctrine and method were to become the basis of both Nazi and Russian Marxist propaganda, and it is at the heart of today’s mind-control by the media in the United States. Unsocialized, reared outside of the influences of the culture employing it, one recognizes these things immediately.

I was an orphan, you know, provided myself a highs school education while living in a sod hut by a river in Iowa. Poverty has its advantages.

Today, I have another occasion where I have specialized insight where media propagandizing and public reaction related are known to me by way of personal experience. That’s where Fidel Castro and Cuba are concerned. The U.S. Government and the media it controls (that you can believe in a free and entrepreneurial press in a nation inflicted with an Internal Revenue Service is an example of the mind-numbing influence of behavioral propagandist technology) have waged an unrelenting war of propaganda against Cuba and its president. Nothing, no claim of concupiscence, avarice, power-madness, or profligate depravity generally, is too much.

One is reminded of assertions during Word War Two that a raging Hitler seized a carpet from the floor and chewed on it.

No matter how nonsensical, anything said about the hated “dictator” of Cuba is true in the United States. In a manner reminiscent of the Catholic Church of my youth, it is even unpatriotic to doubt, or to believe otherwise. The Cuban must be demonized, as a matter of U.S. doctrine and foreign policy.
Today, it’s a report by Forbes Magazine that Fidel Castro is the world’s seventh wealthiest man. Accounts of his supposed wealth range from five hundred, fifty-five million dollars to nine hundred million dollars. Somehow, the Cuban is also called a billionaire. That “Americans” are an innumerate people is perhaps demonstrated by the apparent disregard for the obvious.

As I’ve been saying, a visitor from another planet would draw several conclusions from the Forbes Story. He would ask, for instance, why a man who is supposed to be the absolute dictator of his nation, one eighty years of age, would have the need for any money. Why bother – counting, providing for, and all that; or having someone do all the same for him – with money? What would he purchase that he couldn’t have without the bother? Why would a monarch keep money?

What would an old man, assured of all life’s essentials, want with vast amounts of money?

Here again, I have specialized insight. I’m seventy. A man who once earned in a single month (April, 1974) one million, seven hundred sixty seven thousand, two hundred thirty-four dollars and seventeen cents ($1,764,234.17), I was impoverished by the U.S. Government and its Gestapo, the IRS. I needed only a short time to realize the power of poverty; more, I discovered the shear delight in the freedom of having whatever one wanted without being burdened with all the necessary interplay between acquisitive and avarice-driven human beings. Few of even Castro’s detractors would say he is stupid, and to attribute to him avarice is nonsense.

Finally, there is the history of U.S. media’s reporting where the island of Cuba since its revolution are concerned. It there is a better, more egregious, example of self-serving bias and concomitant indoctrination of the public, anywhere in history, I will be surprised. All of the U.S. Government’s earlier justifications for its posture vis a vis the island nation have since been repudiated by events. Since the so-called fall of the Soviet Empire, and rapprochement with the once hated – and almost as continually vilified – Communist China, “Castro’s Cuba” has remained a pariah, the paragon of evil.

Without mind-bending nonsense indoctrination, of course, that is nonsense. But it illustrates my point. The human being believes what he wants to believe, or what he has been behaviorally conditioned to believe. The mind-control methods of the military industrial corporation powers who rule here in the “Land of the Free” are well advanced. State of the art.

The only way to stay free of them – i.e., actually free – is to withdraw. As Ayn Rand (author of “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead,” and others) once observed, “There is no way to rule innocent men.” I’ve learned a corollary, that there is no way to rule men who are not in debt. That, in the Land of the Fee, is poverty.

Poverty is power.