The Bigger Problem

"Miseducation is harder to overcome than ignorance." 
             -- Francis W. Porretto

Once again I run across a tidbit from Liberty's Torch that becomes the seed for a post here. Francis managed to encapsulate an idea in just seven words.  Sometimes, really great quotes don't get the appreciation they deserve. Maybe this one little sentence struck me so significantly because I have enough worldly experience.

Maybe it set off bells and whistles in my head because I've had to deal with the truth of that statement so much lately.

At the risk of boring my more intelligent readers, I feel like expounding on the quote above. I guess another reason for this is that I've got several decades of experience that growing older does not guarantee growing wiser; at least not in a society that coddles ignorance and stupidity.  Recently I've had to encounter the most egregious sin of stupidity.  Willful ignorance.  While lately I have seen this attitude most irritatingly in people quite older than myself, I try to mitigate my angst by seeing an underlying attitude of: "I'm old, I've paid my dues, and I'm not long for this world anyway."

Believe it or not, I've spent enough time thinking about this that I now have two categories of willful ignorance. In the first kind, the subject is confronted with facts that are so upsetting to his worldview, that he dismisses the new information and quickly moves on to something else that distracts him from having to really ruminate on it.  It may be in the back of his mind, able to resurface later if brought about by another event.  But the subject sort of subconsciously suppresses it because the cognitive dissonance is just too uncomfortable to deal with presently.  In this primary level, at least there is hope that the subject will accept the truth in the future.  When I encounter this in an individual, I can easily smile and drop the subject, thinking to myself, "It's okay, he/she's just not ready yet."

But the second level of willful ignorance is where I have to fight the demons that set my blood to boiling. It's when the subject makes clear and very declarative statements to the effect of: "I don't WANT to know." And more importantly, the statements are made with a smile and a smugness as if delivering divine wisdom from on high.  This is where I DO need grace from the Almighty, because I feel like slapping the ever-loving shit out of the jerk.

Getting back to the main idea; both of the levels of ignorance above are most often born out of miseducation.  Ignorance in its pure form simply means that you don't know, but you have not been indoctrinated in any particular direction, like a juror in a fresh venue with no prior knowledge of the case.  The problem comes from being purposely "educated" to believe things that seem very plausible, have been seemingly accepted by the vast majority, and are typically very difficult and time consuming to falsify or prove on one's own. Amusement of all kinds is the modern American sport. Ignorance is bliss. "I'll take the blue pill."

Why?  Well, as much as I don't like leftist/progressives, I'll quote one here.  Gloria Steinem said, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."  Of course, truth won't piss you off until you are forced to come to grips with it.  It's like the child of any age who's parents finally throw him out of the house to go fend for his self. The Eastern Airlines employee or air traffic controller who finds out that the union doesn't really have his best interests at heart. The college graduate who finds out that there is no one looking to hire someone with a masters degree in "Graffiti's Social Importance."
So many more examples I would like to give here, but I'll move on.

People don't cling to false things they believe to be true because of evidence or logic.  They cling to those things because of their emotions.  Kevin Baker over at The Smallest Minority has many uberposts on his blog, along with some long-running exchanges with hoplophobes that help prove this point.  I remember sifting through long threads on his site as well as others, and being dumbfounded at the extremes to which anti-gunners will go to defend their position against all evidence and logic which demonstrates their position to be blatantly stupid.

One reason emotion is such a big issue is because nobody likes to find out they've fallen for a lie.  Short-term lies on the personal level are one thing. Someone in your personal world lies to you, but you eventually find out. Most of your anger can be righteously directed at them, and once you've calmed down you can at least feel good about yourself for discovering the truth.  But the big lies that will really rock your world are just too painful to deal with for a lot of people. Big lies that you find out you actually talked yourself into because they sounded so good.  But it was wrong.  And in the realization it was wrong you become angry. You are angry because it made you feel stupid.

The bigger the lie, the more stupid you feel, and thus the angrier you get.  The force multiplier to the tune of 10X is the fact that you have no one to blame but yourself.  There's not one individual you can blame for knowingly defrauding you.  If you got taken in by Bernie Madoff, you've got someone you can focus your anger on.  But who are you going to take to court or see in shackles over the Social Security Ponzi scheme?

Nothing perpetuates and protects ignorance as much as believing that you already know the truth. Oh, I believe that there are indeed absolute truths. But they are the things which I am always willing to put to the test.  Any test. Over and over.  But when you've come to the conclusion that "the argument/debate is over," then the only thing you have proven is your ignorance. 



Minor Rabbit Trail:  It's so easy to be like one of the sheep in this parade.  It's cool to feel like you are connected with a popular movie star.  It's so easy to let people like Leo and Algore and Bernie the Commie Sanders do your thinking for you, instead of asking the epistemological question: Are they right? How do they know?  What are the arguments on the other side?  If the argument is over, why the need for the march?  Back to my screed.

The things I am willing to argue passionately for are the things I am sure are true, with the caveat that I know I am human and that there may be information yet that I do not have.  But show me someone who is unwilling to entertain a reasonable and intelligent argument, and I'll show you a willfully ignorant and downright stupid fool.

How we got here

ATTENTION:  This is reposted with corrections for the videos and other little details.

If I was forced to blame the current economic recession, malaise, problems (use whatever term you like) on only one thing, it would be ignorance of most of the people.  Ignorance of both history and economics.  And I do mean real economics and not Keynesian theory, which is why I say both history and economics. History proves which economic models work and which ones don't.

Notice the fact that the largest reserves of petroleum energy in the world, more than all of the middle east and Venezuela combined, is laying underneath United States territory. The only close second is Russia, providing 90% of Europe's oil.

 

By the way: you won't find this information easily on the internet anymore.
 The above image is from 2011.  Such info has mysteriously vanished from most sites.  Just like some of my info on this blog has mysteriously vanished. 

Thanks to Jerome Corsi's book on the oil conspiracy, we can now know what most of the rest of the world knows: that petroleum is abiogenic. There is no such thing as "fossil fuel."  Crude oil and natural gas are not made from formerly living things, but by a chemical process in the earth's crust that a couple of Nazi scientists discovered during or before WWII.

We have the greatest technology. We have the greatest basic infrastructure.  We have no lack of consumers who would be happy to purchase goods made right here on American soil.

We have plenty of scientists who know that we could build incredibly safe reactors that would use super cheap and abundant thorium.  Before you watch the video, I want to make a couple of points.  About 40,000 people die every year in the U.S. in vehicle accidents.  About 800,000 people die from standard, non-malpractice medical care.  Just to help you keep the deaths from coal in proper perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayIyiVua8cY

Of course that's not the only way to improve our energy situation. The bloom box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shkFDPI6kGE

But of course, this government would rather throw money down the black holes of solar panels (Remember Solyndra?) Or windmills that nobody wants (NIMBY).

But I say all that to get to the question: What's the real reason we are in this situation?

Worse Than Stupid

Yep.  They think you are worse than stupid.  If you come from flyover country, the parts of the United States that lie between the metropolitan areas of the east and west coasts, the leftist elites think you are some kind of evolutionary throwback.  You are not just ignorant, you don't even have the intellectual capacity to learn to become as sophisticated as they are.

Just go to this site and play the video.  It's barely 3 minutes.

What makes this even worse is that Chris Christie is not really even a conservative.  Christie is actually a liberal who sought a job in power and when he got there, he got mugged by the hard, cold reality that New Jersey is in a financial mess and he had enough intelligence to know that, as he responded to a union goon teacher, the State of New Jersey, unlike the Federal government, can't print money.  Bill Maher and company are the true believers in State control of everything except personally perverse lifestyles.

I'm Almost Speechless

What happens when classical education, reason, and logic are no longer required subjects in school and the leftist moonbats are in charge of government education?

You get this:

Proof Positive

Yesterday I posted about making a choice about what kind of society you want to live in.  There is no easy choice because life is a struggle no matter what you do, and choosing the path that's best for you means lots of careful thought and learning to discern between what is real and what is fiction.

Helping to prove my point about how intellectually lazy people can be, I found this post at Bayou Renaissance Man.

Now stop and ask yourself how much more of a delusion you can create if you have a lot more people and a lot more resources to use for your propaganda.  Add to this the factors of complexity of subject matter.

A Form of Sacrifice

No, this post has absolutely nothing to do with religion.

This post was prompted by a post I read over at Questions and Observations.  The post is titled "The major tasks for the incoming GOP House."  It might be helpful for you to go read the brief post before continuing on here, but I trust what I have to say can stand on its own.

Before I go on, I need to stop and define who I'm talking to. Conservative voters.  All of my instruction and cajoling is directed at you.  If you are a leftist drone or someone who has given up on voting, you are welcome to stay, but I can't imagine why.

We the people who are not going to Washington to legislate have this terrible habit of merely showing up at the polls, holding our noses and voting for the lesser of two or three evils, and then doing little or nothing beyond that, other than complaining loudly about how the GOP sucks, and even then, we only do it with others who think the way we do.  While at parties or church or any other social setting, with rare exceptions, we will smile and nod and keep to safe topics of conversation for fear of getting that wilting look or sharp elbow from a spouse who doesn't want to risk being thought of badly by anybody in the room.

It has been my experience that the leftist drones and such have no qualms about speaking up at parties.  I can't count the number of times I've experienced this personally. I was married to a government school teacher for 21 years and saw it a lot, and most of the time I let her reign me in, and when I didn't "heel" I typically paid for my indiscretion for days afterward.  I even remember attending a wedding shower where there was a woman that I had once considered a friend, the wife of an Episcopal priest.  This was near the end of Bill Clinton's second term, when it was well established that the man was a womanizer, a rapist, and a pathological liar, and yet here was this woman talking about how great a man he was.  Three people who knew me well immediately turned in my direction, I presume to see if I was about to explode. Because it was a wedding shower, and out of respect for the guests of honor, I simply left the room.  I was told later that the mother of the bride made it clear she didn't want to hear Bill Clinton's name mentioned again.

There is a time and place for engaging in political debate, but I don't go looking for it where it doesn't belong. Now that we are over the cliff and dropping into the pit of hell known as socialism, the time for showing polite deference to people like my former friend is now well past.  Of course I have to admit that I've moved up into the mountains and so my exposure to such people in person is limited.  When we go to the feed store or such places as are frequented by folks who cherish freedom and self-sufficiency, it's doubtful that we are going to encounter those who are champions of the involuntary collective.  But if it happens, I will NOT be quiet.  Most of the people that I share DNA with really won't have anything to do with me for that reason.

How many of you know that the revolution that brought about this once great republic was really only supported by about a third of the population or less?  How many know that Benjamin Franklin saw his own son deported to England after the war for being a loyalist to the British crown?  Don't you think there was much anguish and tears in that relationship?  I can't see how any decent father would find any pleasure in being so estranged by his own son.

If there is to be any hope left that we can still live in a free republic, enjoying individual liberty under a rule of constitutional law rather than the whims of a ruling political elite, those of us who claim to be conservators of the principles that this country was founded on are going to have to shed our desire to be liked by those who would go along with a socialist agenda.  We are going to have to speak up.  We are going to have to learn to argue and debate and point out the flaws of the collectivist voodoo ideology that insists that a man-made Utopia can be created.

Don't you wait for the Rand Pauls and Marco Rubios to make the case for truth in the media.  You get in the fray.  Obama instructed his myrmidons to get in the faces of "our enemies."  Well, let's take them on where were we can't be edited like so much video on TV.  Ask your left leaning friends and family who still seem to have a couple of brain cells to rub together, why they think the methods and ideologies that created the conditions in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela, Spain, and Greece will somehow magically work here.

Don't expect incoming Speaker Boehner to use his position to champion true conservatism.  He's already proven that isn't going to happen by how he handled the tax deal he did with Obama.  Boehner is just more of the same, lame, ostensibly loyal opposition to the hard left communist democrats.  Boehner believes that if he just seems to throw an occasional bone in the direction of the majority of GOP voters, they'll quiet down and go back to watching football or American Idol or whatever.  And I fear he may be right.

It isn't just about negative harping either.  The new guys that got elected by conservatives need to hear from you as well, because the media is going to constantly demagogue the issues as if to tell them they were wrong about why they got elected.  Let them know when they are getting it right.

Peterson Syndrome II

The first installment of this essay can be found here.

From my studies on language, the government welfare systems, politics, and history, I find that people are pretty much like electricity and water; they take the path of least resistance and they seek their level.  Both of these things are a corollary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Both of these conditions have never changed in the course of human history.  The founders of the U.S. of A. understood this.  Mankind is not inherently good. Therefore, he needs to be trained in the ways of goodness. The Left wants to believe that mankind is inherently good and because they want it to be so, therefore it must be so. Both cannot be correct.  The proof of this can be found every time one ventures out into the community.  You can easily find one example of the Leftist style of parenting.  It is often hard to find examples of conservative styles of parenting, especially if you live in a large, metropolitan area.

You are in the store, and you can hear the kid wailing, sassing back, just being an all around little jerk in an effort to get his way (girls too).  The reason this is happening is because the parent sees little Johnny or Susie as an adult with all the rights and privileges that they themselves have. Johnny must be negotiated with. Johnny deserves to know that mommy can't afford to buy him that toy. Never mind that he doesn't contribute anything to household income or even know how to balance a checkbook.  The word "No" to Johnny simply means that he hasn't negotiated long enough or used severe enough tactics. This kid has been reared to date under the assumption that Left wing ideas about human nature are true, only to prove that such ideas are nonsense.  This kid has not the slightest inkling of concern over what is good for his family, his mother, or anyone around him.  He wants what he wants and is determined to push the envelope as far as he can to get it.

Once in a great while, you come across a family, often there are two or more children (that's the first clue, and there's a reason for it) where the children are quiet, respectful, and observant.  The older one's might even be helping to tend to the younger ones.  These are kids who have been trained under the assumption that the training is necessary.  Lest there be a misunderstanding, I'm not talking about strict discipline that borders on abuse.  I'm simply talking about loving discipline that helps the child develop into a loving, caring adult.  The conservative understanding of human nature and the subsequent training that results from it, produces people who function well in a society as self-sufficient and contributing to the overall good.  The leftist philosophy of human nature is that of leaving the garden to grow completely untended so that it produces nothing of any value, and we all end up starving.  The only thing that keeps the latter scenario from happening quickly is the reality of human nature that creates the speed bumps on the way to hell.  We just experienced such a kind of speed bump in the 2010 elections, or as P.J. O'Rourke said, "more like a restraining order."

What does this have to do with Peterson Syndrome?  Well, in thinking long about it (and I intend to think more, and refine my thoughts on this), Peterson Syndrome is something akin to Stockholm Syndrome, in that it is induced by outside factors, rather than being something innately organic.  It is my opinion that it is like brainwashing.  Albeit slow and subtle and accomplished by what I would call a "Cattle Conspiracy."  Once a Cattle Conspiracy has fully developed, reality becomes a very inconvenient truth.  This is what we see happening in France and Greece as of this post.  It does not matter that there is no more money to allow government union workers to retire at 55 and continue to collect taxpayer money in the form of pensions. They will riot in the streets until either the government sprinkles more magic pixie dust on the treasury to produce the money, or the government sends in troops to violently squash the rebellion.  This is the fruit of Peterson Syndrome on a large scale.  You could take a classroom full of Greek or French union workers, or for that matter, General Motors union workers and set them all down with charts and graphs and give them a crash course in basic economics and you would be lucky if one or two out of 50 understood that the game was rigged for disaster from the start.  It doesn't matter that the laws of economics have no feelings for their circumstances. They were promised something. Logic and facts be damned. "I have my RIGHTS!"  These people don't even understand the rules that determine whether or not something can or cannot be a "right."  Somebody said  "_____" was a right, and they believe it, and that settles it.  Look for a forthcoming essay on what constitutes a right.

Peterson Syndrome was coined by Joe Huffman about Joan Peterson and her irrational and illogical perception of inanimate firearms and human nature.  I think this became easier for us conservatives to analyze because the firearms issue has statistics that are far less complex for understanding than economics, while at the same time having far more emotional aspects that paint the picture with much more vivid colors.

In the next installment, I'm going to try to show why the promoters of the Peterson Syndrome do what they do.  After that, I hope to delve into their methods.

Peterson Syndrome

I won't get into my reasoning and thoughts about predestination. That's a subject that I wouldn't discuss with someone unless they were a fairly accomplished Bible scholar and over the age of 30 and it would help even more if they had children.  I only mention that to say this: I am very blessed that I did not start college until I was almost 26 years old.  I had been orphaned at 13 and lived at the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch. I had intellect, but no wisdom, and no one to help me or make me realize that good academic scores would realize a big payoff in the future.  After graduating high school, it would be straight into the work world.  Before beginning college I would have had at least six very different jobs.  One of them involved digging in the hot sun to install phone cable with a guy who had a Ph.d.  in some liberal arts field that I don't even remember.  By the time I was 20, I was THE store manager for an auto parts chain. I would go on to more things, and all of that experience gave me some wisdom.

Don't ever confuse knowledge with wisdom.  You can know a lot of crap that is factual and not have "a lick of sense," or wisdom.  You can spend a lot of your time and intellectual power to learn a lot of facts and information that is very useful, or stuff that won't make a pile of dirt worth of difference to your well-being.

My hard won wisdom borne of experience was with me when I started taking the requisite classes for my associate of arts degree.  So, when I had to sit in a college classroom and listen to some instructor pontificate on a subject, my BS meter would go off like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl. I was nothing like the teenagers fresh out of high school who sat there listening to every word that came out of the instructor's mouth as if it was all beyond question.  I had many "lively discussions" with many of my professors, to the shock and disbelief of surrounding students, especially when I made them admit their errors and biases.  It was a couple of years into my college work and also teaching Creation/Biblical apologetics that I discovered what the problem was in academe.  Which brings us to the following quote by Joe Huffman regarding his naming of the condition that we conservatives encounter in people on the left:  Peterson Syndrome; named for Jan Peterson who advocates for the Brady Campaign.  [Hat tip to Kevin at The Smallest Minority]

She is frequently incoherent. She cannot distinguish the difference between intentions and results. If she is a liar she would not repeatedly make these kind of mistakes. Or if she is a liar then she is very very smart and skilled to consistently use the same sort of tool without ever slipping up.

I claim it is not necessarily and in fact probably isn't stupidity. If this were stupidity then this sort of faulty thinking would not continually show up throughout human history even with people that are exceedingly well respected. Every age and society has stupid people in it and they are easily recognized and the instances of them being well respected are exceedingly rare. This is some other type of mental disorder.

This mental disorder can be, and has been, easily detected. Ask the question, "What is the process by which you determine truth from falsity?" People suffering from this mental disorder not only won't be able to supply an answer but frequently cannot even understand the question. The question is nonsensical to them. They are lacking a thinking process. Hence, by necessity, they fail to process information. Asking them to supply a process when they are totally unaware of the existence of such a concept results in the same sort of difficulty as asking a person blind since birth what color the walls are. They have no common basis with the questioner such that they can even understanding the question. This is the same sort of response we get from her. She cannot understand concepts that to us are intuitively, blindingly, demonstrably, obvious. It is nearly impossible for us to believe that she does not understand what we are saying. But if she were blind you would not claim she was stupid or a liar if she did not know the color of the wall.

Joe describes the condition, but does not offer a cause.  This is what I would like to rectify.

The problem begins when the philosophy of education shifts from teaching students HOW to think to just teaching them WHAT to think.  I wondered how we got to this model of education in the United States and most of the western world. In my own autodidactic studies, and teaching of apologetics, I saw the need to demonstrate to my students how important it was to use logic to determine truth.  I had known that in the past, even high schools had debating classes and competitions, but this had become passé.  That's where the breakdown of education had begun.  Having to learn how to reach a conclusion and then articulately defend it is the real measure of knowledge.  With rare exception, such learning is now missing from all "higher" education past the twelfth grade.  When that which is supposed to pass for education has been reduced to merely memorizing facts and information with no understanding of how the information should be usefully applied, society is heading for disaster.

History bores the snot out of kids in the public government school indoctrination centers because it has been stripped of the information that makes it relevant in the name of "separation of Church and State."  Math is boring because it isn't coupled to history and the significance of what each discovery in the field did to improve the human condition. Science is boring to many students for the same reason.  I've always loved science and thought it was fun, but it had nothing to do with what I learned in school.  It was because I was always finding stuff on my own and doing my own experiments.

How many people understand syllogism?  Far too many people cannot recognize a false premise to start with.  This is what creates the famous GIGO condition that software engineers and other scientists in the hard sciences are painfully familiar with (Garbage In, Garbage Out).  If the basic facts or information is flawed, no amount of wishful thinking is going to create a better outcome.  Not within the confines of this space/time continuum.  That is the first lesson of logic.

This will be my first essay on understanding the Peterson Syndrome.  If you'd like to contribute your thoughts on the matter, email me at:  moses5768@yahoo.com.