Rationality has it's issues when you think of it in terms of the confines of the system or society one is immersed within. If you want to survive optimally with others, it's 'rational' to not upset the apple cart and risk a diminishing return to your social position, status or well-being.
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it"
- George Orwell
Source
Speaking up against what others accept is a risky business. People have been persecuted or even killed in the past for doing so. Socrates, Galileo and Giordano Bruno are some examples that always come to mind.
If we are 'rational' to adhere to the irrational system that produces detrimental results, we don't help ourselves or others in the long run. Disaster is on the horizon. Politicians sell us false promises, free things, play on our hopes and dreams, that we buy into in order for them to win elections and then they further produce a decay of irrationality into our way of life. Many of us participate in this backwards system.
"Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality."
- Michael Ellner
If you act against the insanity of an irrational system, you can be viewed as insane. To those who are blind to themselves or the true condition of society, the sane appear insane.
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives... I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends... and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it."
- John Lennon, Interview BBC-TV (June 22, 1968)
Questioning the actual rationality and sanity of our way of life is required for us to better our progress as individuals and as a collective community/society.
"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Source
Conforming to the group-think collectivism of false ways of living is counter-productive in the long-term, despite any short-term gains to our immediate survival and acceptance within the insane, irrational or sick society.
"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society"
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Source
Comforting to sickness makes us sick. Conforming to insanity makes us insane. Conforming to irrationality makes us irrational.
If we refuse to see what we are doing, what we have become, then we can't change the condition we are in. We must face the dark mirror in order to bring about change for the better. Looking into the darkness of who we are allows us to let it go and reach for the light.
"Human sickness is so sever that few can bear to look at it... but those who do will become well."
Vernon Howard
Source
Courage is required to stand up and go against the grain of social pressure to conform and fit in. To get things to change, we often have to be willing to sacrifice personal attachments, like comfort, convenience and our secure and sage positions of not being hassled.
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are."
- H.L. Mencken
Speaking the truth to falsity has revolutionary potential to make things change. If we don't speak up when we can see things others can't, who will? If we all depend on others to take the risk when we won't ourselves, why would anyone else take that risk?
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell
Source
At some deep level at the core of our being, we all want truth. We yearn for truth.
To not speak about truth to counter the falsity, breaks us inside. It fractures and disintegrates us at some core level. No one else can see it, but do in our inner vision, if not then we can feel it at some level. If we silence ourselves we disempower ourselves and can become disillusioned with how we live our lives. The risk of feeling lonely, being isolated and separate, is one that must be understood.
The more we learn and understand about truth, and the conflict of a society to the reality of that truth, we become are conflicted ourselves. To live in the fantasy unreality we are creating, or to isolate and be lonely due to lack of resonance and coherence with truth.
Relationships based on common ground and common interests and common understanding is limited when ignorance persists. To live in society is required, but to a limited extent is possible. The truth conflicts with the deceptions we immerse ourselves in.
Being in truth while living in deceptions around us creates a loss of integrity, coherence, sanity, etc. We can't be our true self to others because of the conditioning to the attachment in the fantasy that persists. Isolation and detachment results.
The divergence or gap between relative degrees of understanding and perception of reality can be too great to promote an engagement in common truth and common living. We are often forced to comply with things we don't want to accept in order to get along and survive. Emergence in the deception to some degree follows as a result of interaction with those who can't see the truth and therefore a loss of integrity of self ensues.
"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic."
- Eric Fromm, Swiss Psychologist (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness)
There is a price to bear for speaking up on issues. But despite the disconnection externally we might encounter from others, we become more connected internally. We become more united within, integrated at the core of our being, harmonious and aligned with the values and principles we want to live by and see propagate into the world.
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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We are immersed in a brainwashing society. I don't pay attention to what is demanded by propaganda, therefore it has zero effect on me. You can't tame an idealist and hardcore dreamer. My inner voice guides me, I'd be dead if didn't listen.
Brainwashing is strong, and people think it's only in fiction, they don't get the symbolism of the word.
Indeed, it's not fiction. When I read THE FOUR AGREEMENTS last summer, it confirmed what I thought about how society conditions us. It's not easy to break free and for me applying the 4 agreements is like a tough workout everyday.
I have a few bellweather friends whose blind faith in the extant system is so clearly insane, that when I find myself agreeing with them on something. I worry I might have swallowed the blue pill. Curiously, when I disagree with anything as it is presented via the control structure, one of them habitually responds with "that's crazy!" No amount of arguing and no number of facts can ever change their minds. I know, I've tried.
When the current system finally implodes - as it ultimately (hopefully) must - I ask myself what the world will look like to them then? If what we live in is sanity, what does insanity look like? I don't like embedding videos in responses, so will post the link here to Black Pilled's The Sleeping Enemies that treats the "red pill/blue pill" topic in a relevant way (5 mins). Eminently watchable.
Eeek, yeah, it's hard to see how people just don't care to know. Apathy and ignorance rule them as falser selves.
You sound like me Krnel, we share the same opinion in many regards.
Nietzsche is one of my favorite authors. Nietzsche would have been labeled a "Nazi" nowadays and put behind bars.
That guy speaks so much unfiltered truth.
Heroes and people that speak the truth are put behind bars now or they get killed, which tells me that tyrants rule everywhere nowadays.
What I have found hilarious after some reflection is when someone labels you mentally ill that it is according to society that you are mentally ill.
The funny thing is, that being a brain-dead sheep (99% of society) that is unable to think critically or to stand for something because of fear and ignorance is what I consider mentally ill because that sheep is barely able to think for itself.
This is my favorite Nietzsche quote:
“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!”
Yeah, unthinking is what I call it, reflexive thinking and processing in automated ways relative to the causal interchange of necessary interactions in life. Ignorance rules.
It is still good to be rational in an irrational society when the lies stands on the way, it can only be fought with the Truth. Just like Socrate, the truth is worth dying for. Every government will find it easy when no one speaks again their ill activities but when confronted with, they tend to make adjustment to keep the office or integrity
My take on this and what I practice daily in order to make sense of it all is Honesty to myself.
I like being honest and I want to act honestly before others. This means that i do not moddly coddle situations. I seek to interact with someone so we stop being entities in a corporate environment, full of stature of positions and instead engage as two simple humans.
People think they have great power when they hold a position or title... yet it means nothing. A one liner at the bottom of your email footer. That doesn't make you a better person with a greater chance of survival during any sort of conflict or hazard.
When those dangers are upon us then we are just human again. The great equalizer. So the questions is not just whether or not we can identify that society is bullshit and that it's full of madness.
The question is what will we do to make a change in it all?
Yup, titles are appeals to authority. Call me Dr, not Mr. It's Mr. President, not Barack or Obama. Well lawdy dah mr. appeal to authority trying to elevate yourself above me, fuck you :P
Caring for truth will change it all.
Good post. In recent years I have been observing and struggling with, what seems to me to be, the insanity of relativism and identity politics brought on by the infection of society with post-Modernism. I find it very difficult to communicate with people who have bought into this ideology. People who seem to have little real-world experience. Isolation and alienation are real things, and I feel them in these times.
Boy, is it ever insanity. Post modernism, subjecitvism and relativism are the bane of thinking and human progress.
Curated for #informationwar (by @openparadigm)
Relevance: The Value of Truth
Our Purpose
In the time of Socrates, Galileo and Giordano Bruno no one could go against the belief of the church no one could have an idea, when Giordano Bruno said that the planet Earth was not the center of the universe and that the sun was just one more star of the solar system was accused of a heretic for contradicting the church and was taken to the stake .. in our modern era there are irrational and rational people .. in the ancient era the thing was different. I know that my comment is irrelevant but I liked it when you talked about these characters and I studied a lot about socrates, galileo, giordano bruno and copernico.
There is a connection between truth and reason, obviously. But Rationality is not reason. Do not confuse this. For precision of language toward the factual world is the solution (regardless the moral system) - the ultimate and last source of stability in a topsy-turvy world.
Rationalizing isn't the same as being rational and reasonable. And we use reason to rationalize and justify or excuse things, sure. If you look into the root of the two words, they have the same root, in ratio. There are overlaps.
You're absolutely right. In everyday usage the correct relationship between rationale, rationality, rational, rationalization and reason is so utterly jumbled that the confusion seeps into intelligent conversation, even our thinking. I thought this is case with your article. I should of said this. This is what I mean.
It really is a very wonderful article thinkers very well chosen my friend
Perhaps you could reward this wonderful article with a wonderful upvote?
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Great Quotes by Great People!
evry good job ... :D
For anyone but an American speaking freely is a crime, I don't know how they cope with the repression.
Keep it up. Love the posts.
the truth is that I enjoyed your post, my country is currently going through an economic crisis and have lost values only operate physiological needs and when a person behaves by letting themselves be carried away by their cerebral cortex is really strange
I was talking about the integrity of trying to unite with people, true unity, based on silence and letting falsity persist around us. We are featured by the society because the society is fractured, even though we try to live and create with a solid integrated foundation, we must bear and suffer the falsity around us and that prevents us from living integrated in a society that is integrated. We aren't as integrated as we can be, we are fractured in part because of the world we live in that can't match the ideals we try to live by.
The unstoppable mechanism of Logic needs a point of departure, a value of any kind. You could as well choose the worst value you can imagine and let Logic mercilessly take you to its hellish conclusion. I mean to say you have to lay your foundations wisely too.