Creating a World of Distrust
I remember a time when people were left to their own devices when determining what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Remember “Bat Boy?” A strange Weekly World News (sister tabloid to the National Enquirer) creation set to terrorize and dismay. Did anyone really believe this? I doubt if many did. Some did, I’m sure, but what can ‘ya do?
I remember wondering about it. I was still young and impressionable (actually, I still wonder about it, I guess I am old and impressionable now). The operative word here is “wonder.” No government agency told me I was not allowed to wonder if something was “true” or not. I figured that out on my own. Why is this good? Well, for one thing, you would have to be a nutcase to allow the government, or any authoritative power, to tell you what you were allowed to wonder about. Secondly, wondering is healthy. It hones your senses; you figure stuff out on your own. There is nothing more powerful than having to figure something out on your own. It takes something called “thinking”—which seems to be in low supply these days.
I just saw a meme with two heads speaking to one another. One head is visibly angry and is saying something like, “look at this!!!” holding up a cell phone. The other head says, “oh yeah, let me tell you what I think of that.” The angry head says, “shut up idiot!! You are not an expert!!” There’s more to it than that, but that’s enough to make my point.
Expert? Since when do you have to be an expert to have an opinion? Sure, if you were in an operating room witnessing a brain surgery and the surgeon moves a scalpel in a certain way and you yell out, “excuse me, Dr. Surgeon, uh, I think you might want to cut THAT instead.” And the surgeon says, “shut up, idiot!! You are not an expert!!” MAYBE that would be ok . . . but . . . who knows?
I have a real life experience similar to that little story. When my first wife was dying of cancer, something went horribly wrong with her Port-A-Cath (a device surgically placed in your chest for easy administration of chemo). She got very sick, and had some rather obvious symptoms. I scoured the Internet for clues, and thought I had figured out that the Port-A-Cath was plugged up with a blood clot.
We went to see her Harvard-educated oncologist who immediately diagnosed her condition as accelerated cancer growth at the site of the Port-A-Cath. I said, “no way!” and was told, albeit in different words, “shut up idiot! You are not an expert!” I realized what I was dealing with and to make a long story short, I manipulated my way around his ego and got him to change his diagnosis to “blood clot on the Port-A-Cath.” And I made it seem like he came up with it himself, not me. It saved her life.
So . . . never underestimate a non-expert idiot. What does this mean? Yes, there ARE experts, and then there is just useful insight. I believe we have been maliciously trained to ignore the latter, and pay attention only to the former. But it gets worse. Who determines who the experts are? You guessed it. The “state.” Yahoo . . . now we’re happy.
“Science” has also been made into the state’s impenetrable god figure that only certain “experts” actually understand. Fauci is one of these “Science Priests.” Only he, and a few like him with a similar appointed position, can determine what science is. So rather than yelling “Fauci-denier” we hear “science denier.” Definitions of certain words, such as “vaccine” and “immune” among several others, have been conveniently changed in order to fit the “New Science.” So now no one can utter anything, no opinion, no alternative insight, nothing, if it disagrees with the hierarchy now set in place.
It is interesting how much disdain is projected on “normal people” making comments about sacrosanct “determinations” handed down from the priests on high. And anything anyone says, if it is convenient to do so, can be disregarded as “non-truth” depending on the “expert status” of the speaker. I recently got into an argument with a “vax-cultist.” He was claiming that no vaccine, including the Covid shot, is fully safe and effective (duh). “Who says it is!” he blurted out. Wow, he walked right into that one. I suggested a few names, particularly the President of the United States, Joe Biden—“the vaccines are safe and effective.”
His response? “Biden is not a virologist, he is not an expert, so no one should listen to him.” What?? I said the same about Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, who claimed the vaccines were never meant to stop transmission. My friend’s response? “Bourla is a business executive, not an expert on vaccines.” What?? This is what we are up against.
But where did all this start? Surely in the Bat Boy days people were not so gullible to need “experts” to tell them if Bat Boy was real or not. (Well, some people were I guess.) The point again is that we made these determinations ourselves once upon a time. Sure, we often referred to experts for things that mattered, like brain surgery. But we did not think there was only one expert in the whole world. We got second opinions. We even got opinions from friends and family. We listened to different viewpoints, different insights. Sure, we would not ask Uncle Bob to wield the knife if surgery was imminent, but we might listen to his experiences if he at one time had a similar surgery.
Yes, there are things in the world that are far too complex for us to figure out on our own. But you might be surprised those examples account for a very small number of things we personally have to deal with. And for the most part, our concerns about complex systems like microwaves, 5G, jabbing with strange medicines, among many others, more often than not turn out to be correct. A common sense question like “if this vaccine is brand new, how DO they know what will happen in five years?” is quite appropriate to ask, you don’t need to know anything more complex than that. Hearing as an answer, “don’t worry, we know what we are doing,” has never, ever, been reassuring.
I think this deliberate process into a “non thinking” world has been slow and steady, and a study of this phenomenon would take a book full of research to completely flesh out. The Western educational system is a good place to start, and the hypnotization of the Western medical system that has been fully monetized, and manoeuvred by powerful forces, since the beginning of the 19th Century is another. It is a formidable problem of which we are currently seeing the devastating results.
Intuition and common sense are vastly underrated in this age of the "expert." There are ways of knowing that do not come from a textbook and we've all been saved or have saved someone else because we questioned the so-called experts, as per Todd's Port-A-Cath experience. Medicine has become a tick-the-boxes enterprise where the patient has become merely a list of symptoms and not a person who is the expert on him/herself.
One needn't have gone to medical school to know that the 6-foot social distancing rule was a fabrication, that pieces of cloth would not stop a virus and that those idiotic plastic barriers in front of cashiers were beyond useless. We've gone soft and have outsourced our thinking in exchange for the illusion of safety and an easy life. I remember when education was about learning how to think and not what to think. So yes Todd, the education system would be a great place to start but school boards are too busy pushing gender pronouns instead of teaching kids the grammatical function of a a pronoun in a sentence. How far we have fallen.
Only a fool thinks he knows everything.
The one who admits he knows nothing is truly a wise man and seeker.