Everything people tell you, everything you read and watch, influences and impacts your conception of reality. We can easily be influenced by others into accepting beliefs as truth; unreality as reality. Manipulation and deception works on psychological beings. Of all the animal kingdom, we are the best at manipulation and deceiving, and we are the ones that are the most manipulated and deceived.
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This is all done with symbols. Symbols are required to communicate knowledge and/or influence others. Be they pictographic or abstract like letters and our verbal languages. Our imagination can reflect images from the outer reality, but also fabricate things that aren’t directly reflected or exist in reality.
Using and understanding symbols and language is common place. But some are more skilled at it. Being better able to manipulate symbols and language translates to an increased ability to influence others. This was even more evident in the past when few were even literate enough to read or write.
The writers of the past who authored most text were known as scribes. Whether writing through their own intent or being paid to write things for others, they wielded the power of symbols and could influence people with beliefs. The priestly cast of various ancient civilizations also had this power, such as Egypt for instance.
The priestly controllers who had the ear of the ruler, also often put them in power as figurehead. The priestly cast held the power with their science of imagery. These are the symbol sorcerers, the dark occultists, using word magic to manipulate society. With influence, you can instill confusion, anxiety and fear in the minds of people. Imagery, convincing rhetoric, symbol manipulation can induce, invoke and summon feelings in people. Think of a poem or church sermon as examples. People can be given beliefs which feed them hope or faith in something else, or someone else. The sorcerers of symbol then have their claws in your consciousness; in your sense of self and sense of reality.
As much as symbols can generate fear, those with dark intent can also create beliefs or use existing beliefs to alleviate fear. This is a two vector pathway to control. People put into a state of fear can respond to input stimulus in predictable ways which makes them more easily manipulated towards a favored outcome. The fearful in their insecurity will welcome the control of those who promise to give them security. They are in chaos and welcome the seeming order that control brings.
People will give up their freedom for the promise of illusory order and security. It’s not real order or security, but a false proxy which does the opposite. When you have less freedom you have more slavery, and this is chaos, not order. The world has been and is being driven into chaos and slavery through abstract beliefs and manufactured threats to invoke fearful responses and desired predictable outcomes. This year, 2020, has shown how well this methodology works on us.
We are powerful beings of consciousness, with the capacity to yield great power over ourselves, others, and reality. With great power comes great responsibility. We have the power to create good and evil into the world. People are failing to understand the immense power of belief and how it can shape the direction of life, for ourselves and other beings on this planet. Believes drive our behaviors and actions. Changing beliefs, or not using them as foundational motivators, can change what happens in the world.
We are sold and buy into many beliefs that motivate immoral behavior. Looking at history shows how often this has occurred. Look at Nazi Germany. Communist Russia and China. Religions in general, especially the Inquisition. History is a story of how we fail and succeed to live morally at different times. Humanity has been fooled by beliefs, buying what others have sold and acted in consequence to those beliefs. The belief in authority is one of the most entrenched that has led to most of the atrocities in history.
At first I reacted negatively to your statement that we are the best animals at deception, given some of the superb camouflage of hunter and prey species. But upon reflection, I have to agree completely. We are designed to be fooled, because it is necessary in order to reach agreement and order society nominally. As eusocial but highly intelligent animals, the potential for individuals to benefit from actions must be able to be sublimated to the social order, or society will break from all the undertakings that benefit ambitious individuals but leave harmful residues, or are predation on others.
It is not necessary that we be completely subjugated to be able to cooperate however, and there is, it seems to me, an optimal point at which individuals best thrive within a well functioning society. That optimum is far short of the subjugation that overlords are most empowered by, but also far more ordered than complete anarchy could potentiate. Human history is the result of innumerable experiments in defining this optimum, and replete with examples of misses, near and far.
We, it seems to me, are failing to benefit from history in a most profound way, as a species of nations and communities of people seeking to improve the lives of their posterity. We are making the error, common and well proven to be erroneous in history, of empowering overlords too much. When it comes down to the test of a society's functioning, overlords are just individuals, and presently the lions share of resources are being directed to overlords economically, rather than society as a whole.
They like it, but far too many plebs languish and die of lack to tolerate such aggrandizement of overlords in functional societies. It becomes more possible as advances in technology enable resources to be more finely managed, but it also becomes possible to better manage those resources such that society as a whole benefits optimally, rather than overlords. We're failing at that IMHO.
Our social nature impels us to accept deception and overlords in order that society is able to effect the blessings of civilization, rather than descend into squabbling between acquisitive individuals, but we must adopt limits to the self-abnegation we are willing to endure, to specifically prevent overlords from too parasitizing society. It appears we have failed spectacularly at that task today, and our posterity is threatened with the prospect of abject penury and horrific captivity comparable to factory farms because we have allowed overlords to overstep their proper bounds.
The marches in Berlin of recent days reveal that we are seeking to rectify this fault as a species. We need more of that, and with greater impact right quick.
Should this bud blossom, examples in history of famine and societal collapse in the 20th Century that are exemplary of the destruction we will suffer will look like good times to our posterity.
Thanks!
You only need to be subjugated and under the law, moral law, not any other individuals or the pressure of group conformity or mob rule. Giving away our power, or allowing it to be taken in our names as we do nothing to stop, is a near-eternal problem. Maybe one day we get to overcome our obedience to authority. Overlords have no proper bounds though, they overstep as soon as they are an overlord ;)
We act as a herd. Even when we know we feel helpless and afraid of the group sanctions...
Covi-baahhhhhhh :)
After reading your post & comments form @valued-customer I felt this would be worth sharing:
So you agree then.
MORALITY / IMMORALITY is subjective.
Because all that you outline here in this post is dealing with human created systems.
Neither of the quoted statements imply in any way that humans create morality itself. They simply state we can differentially be moral or immoral.
Substitute the concept of velocity for morality in the above statements and they will be just as true, and reveal that neither speed nor direction is nothing but a human concept. They are aspects of the universe that we can differentially express in our actions.
Well velocity is ACTUALITY. Measurable.
My point here is that MORALITY does not exist outside of human psyche. It's not actuality. It's purely belief.
A belief cannot be objective.
How do you measure morality as one would measure velocity?
I have to point out that my incompetence does not prevent reality from being actual. Our feeble grasp of reality is no constraint on reality. It's a fact that our lack of understanding is absolutely real, and only an absolute fool expects to know everything there is to know.
Real scientists know that the more they learn, the more they learn they don't know.
You seem to believe your beliefs are flawless, and I am utterly incompetent to judge whether they are or not. I am however confident of my personal nescience regarding such things as history, morality, and etc., so am just as confident my judgment of morality is - at best - incomplete, if not bass ackwards completely.
Please don't consider my judgment of any import. It's a small thing to be judged by me, as I am a very tiny ambulatory bag of glop in a very big and mysterious universe. I hope you reasonably value your own judgment of such massive and complex questions.
Lol you've completely sidestepped the point in your usual, elaborate paragraph construction utilising words cleverly. That's not an insult though..
I've always respected AND admired your word usage ACTUALLY <--- (See actually. Meaning that the view I hold is based on evidence. Your very measurable ability displayed with your every comment.)
That's the difference I point out.
That subjectivity really has no actuality. We utilise so much (like good v evil) in our systems but this is out of necessity. We could not have become civil without introducing measures, checks and balances.
I don't claim to know everything either. I completely agree with you on that point that humans are flawed in thinking we (as a species) think that our sciences can understand it all.'What is CONSCIOUSNESS' is that thorn in our thumb which both ridicules that notion and also collapses the relevance of our sciences to understand "REALITY."
My view is that there are many realms that make up 'Our Universe'. This realm/plane where we exist however is primarily PHYSICALITY so that is the objectivity that we can measure. Such as velocity of energy.
I didn't sidestep anything. I stated directly that it is impossible to know the things under discussion at present. Stating knowledge of them is thus not factual, and I decline to do so.
But YOU made the assertion that morality is comparable to velocity. I then asked you how we could measure morality like we measure velocity.
You did not provide an answer.
The use of symbols is important. Semiotics play a huge role in our perception over reality. Every language aims to construct a message by using the right kind of symbolism. Actually it's a form of art to know on what symbols to click in order to get the response one would want