the pain of n e u f n e u f

[click picture]

One of my readers and correspondents mentioned yesterday that I cause him pain. He has difficulty with some of my positions on arch villains, for example. I don't want to explain, but I don't like being a source of pain if it isn't leading to great joy. I'm not that good at it, but I'm on the right track. When I say stuff that seems more than just an outside-the-box slant on something, a statement that tends to make you think I'm outright deluded, you should know that the cause is likely to be my effort to unchain us from our outright deluded conditioning.

Albanians used to refer to the United States as "The Revisionists" and everybody knew who they were talking about. We like to think we are of tougher mental fiber and can see through the lies being fed to us. We're wrong. We don't have a good enough bead on the extent of the lies and spin that have been fed to us since earliest childhood to not be wrong. The quality of the information that filters down to us has been seriously substandard for... my whole life... and degenerating appallingly.

Plus, almost none of us are even able to think above or beyond what it serves our own personalities to make of any bit of information, even if it is impeccable to begin with. The exact same statement can evoke whole universes of different reactions in the populace, even though there is usually a way to take such a thing from a grounding in actuality. We're rarely even cognizant of actuality on a local level, let alone from somewhere else in the world. No. Our political leanings rush in to color our experience of it. So do our personality quirks. We immediately assess all things for how we can use them to further illustrate ourselves to the others with whom we interact. So actuality gets shunted out of sight instanter in all that comes within reach of our senses. [Actually, pain is one of the least affected by this of any sensory inputs, but it's really hard to work with that when you want to communicate reality... unless you're a sociopath, that is.] The minute Obama says something, Clintonites are making something unflattering of it. The minute the Dalai Lama opens his mouth, we are all making of it more reason to think him a sweet and lovely person, while the Chinese government is sent directly into gales of invective against his evil perfidy. All over the identical inputs. We make of everything either what we've been conditioned to make of it, or what serves us to think about it, not what it is.

That's just when we get the straight dope. What about when it's spin? What about when it's lies? That's the only kind of news we EVER get about anyone the government wants to paint in a certain light. Ever. Do you think that getting English translations of reports from other sources helps? It does a little bit, depending on the translators, of course, but that too is skewed by the POV of the source and the translator.

THEN there is the nearly insurmountable problem of understanding that bad past actions do NOT mitigate the goodness of present actions, that in terms of world leaders' actions especially, whatever they do that helps big populations is not lessened by anything they did before. Heap on this the trouble with making any one action stick into the good category or bad category, and yer dropped into a bottomless well of hassling over stuff that has left fundamental reality back up there at ground level.

There are little constellations of considerations truth junkies take into account when communicating. If you find it painful, it might be a good sign, or it might be a sign you could use to alert you to turn it into a good thing.

Up to you.

I only ever say this stuff to warn you that the times you are thinking That 99 is off her gourd! could well be times when I'm trying to get at something else, purposely startling you into looking. Of course, much of the time it could actually be that I am off my gourd, but, hey....

I mean... seriously... I love and admire both these old coots....
Go figure....