Ten Lies that Humanity is addicted to - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15206793
All civilizations live and die by their commonly shared myths - their Big Lies.

And these lies always make them "stronger" for a short period of time.

But then... suddenly... reality strikes back and destroys their civilizations with no mercy.

Reality doesn't care about your mafia leaders "need" for lies.

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David Swanson wrote:Top 10 Things People Pretend They Don’t Know
by David Swanson

10. It costs vastly less money and is far more effective (and with fewer costs of every sort) to prevent crime by providing things like housing, nutrition, education, healthcare, retirement, and guaranteed income, than to attempt to deter crime through mass incarceration, capital punishment, and the use of armed forces to address addiction or tell people they are driving too fast.

9. There is no shortage of money or needed resources, not in the United States, and not on Earth. By choosing to do without billionaires or bigger militaries, we could also do without poverty or hunger. By choosing to do without health insurance companies and current government healthcare programs, the U.S. could spend less and get more, like other countries do.

8. The Earth’s climate and ecosystems are rapidly collapsing, and are in no way being seriously addressed by the world’s governments, least of all by the government of the United States, which has done more damage than any other.

7. Maintaining — never mind building and proliferating — nuclear weapons is and always was absolutely insane, in no way justifiable, and generative of a serious risk of ending all life on Earth before other destructive behaviors can do so.

6. Violent efforts to improve the world are usually far less effective, successful, or lasting than nonviolent efforts, and the idea that violence can be justified is a delusion sustained by entertainment and unthinking anger.

5. Industrial societies are not superior to indigenous and sustainable societies, and among industrial societies the most superior is not that of the United States, which trails most others in life expectancy, health, education, happiness, and liberties.

4. It is not true that we can (and must) continue enlarging economies on a finite planet. An economic system that requires that impossible and immoral feat is in need of major changes.

3. Every single person is of value, and prejudice against anyone is equally stupid. We don’t have time for overcoming sexism but not racism, or overcoming racism but not xenophobia, or to go on “humanizing” away every little prejudice one at a time. We’re going to have to speed up the rejection of all prejudice.

2. Corrupt political systems do not represent or speak for you or care about you even when one part (or Party) of them is even worse than some other part.

1. Death is actually death, and there’s no God, or gods, or spirits, or mystical forces, or something heartwarmingly powerful about the extent of our ignorance, that absolves us of complete responsibility for what we do and fail to do. ...


Any other *socially-shared Foundational Lies* you can think of?

soundtrack
#15206934
ckaihatsu wrote:Um, what's wrong with government health care, like Medicare -- ? Aren't you 'Medicare for All', or NHS, or whatever -- ?

Still reading. There may be more.

It's true that the author slipped this onto a list of things I otherwise agree with.

But perhaps he was referring to Michel Foucault's bio-power, and how any government regulation of health care leads to abuse-of-power?

I also think community health care is crucial. But perhaps there is a nuance to explore that makes "government top-down" healthcare (or even worse, capitalism-top-down health care, like in the USA) very different from the system that exists in Cuba, for example, where medicine is government guaranteed, but very local in structure and focus.

I think we need the author of the original list to chime in.

***

Industrial societies are not superior to indigenous and sustainable societies

The above "lie" is my favorite on the list, because it helps explain all the others by pointing to the importance of **paradigm**.
#15206936
ckaihatsu wrote:Um, what's wrong with government health care, like Medicare -- ? Aren't you 'Medicare for All', or NHS, or whatever -- ?

Still reading. There may be more.


You need to understand that Qatz is a primitivist in a sense that he advocates for removal all of technology from society and return to hunter-gatherer way of life which might or might not include crop cultivation because that damages society and climate.
#15206941
No, Qatz is not a senseless primitivist.

What is wrong with Medicare is that it is the most expensive system in the world and one of the least efficient systems in the world. It is the most costly in the planet and the least efficient. Worst buck for your money as long as social healthcare is concerned.
#15206943
noemon wrote:No, Qatz is not a senseless primitivist.

What is wrong with Medicare is that it is the most expensive system in the world and one of the least efficient systems in the world. It is the most costly in the planet and the least efficient. Worst buck for your money as long as social healthcare is concerned.


TEN LIES THAT HUMANITY IS ADDICTED TO

He is talking about HUMANITY and not the US specific.
#15206946
noemon wrote:You are being obtuse. The source quoted is clearly US specific.


I don't think I am. @QatzelOk ?
#15206960
QatzelOk wrote:
It's true that the author slipped this onto a list of things I otherwise agree with.

But perhaps he was referring to Michel Foucault's bio-power, and how any government regulation of health care leads to abuse-of-power?



Stay away from the postmodernists -- that's a tip, some free good advice. They screwed around with that idea of 'personal power', as though society is somehow the sum of its individuals. It's atomistic, and you already know better, anyway, with all of your critiques of corporations and Western Civilization.


QatzelOk wrote:
I also think community health care is crucial. But perhaps there is a nuance to explore that makes "government top-down" healthcare (or even worse, capitalism-top-down health care, like in the USA) very different from the system that exists in Cuba, for example, where medicine is government guaranteed, but very local in structure and focus.

I think we need the author of the original list to chime in.

***

Industrial societies are not superior to indigenous and sustainable societies



Sorry, but they are, because of concomitant increases in medicine and technology. Like all tech even the Western medical paradigm has its 'life cycles', and some trends may be past their prime or just money-makers, like the opioid thing.

Here's the proof:


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QatzelOk wrote:
The above "lie" is my favorite on the list, because it helps explain all the others by pointing to the importance of **paradigm**.
#15206966
noemon wrote:What is wrong with Medicare is that it is the most expensive system in the world and one of the least efficient systems in the world. It is the most costly in the planet and the least efficient. Worst buck for your money as long as social healthcare is concerned.

Exactly.

Also, what the author bemoans, in the author's original words: "...current government healthcare programs..."

So he is not saying that healthcare has no place, or that government has no role. He is saying that the current way we do medicine is all wrong and resource consumptive.

The Lies We All BelieveTM are usually profit-driven. And it's no different in current health care practices, no matter what the current funding model (though the USA is near worst and contaminates all the others).

I think Cuba may have solved this with Revolutionary Medicine. But few other nations have. They are all to beholden to making doctors rich, shareholders rich, or bureaucrats rich.

ckaihatsu wrote:a chart we all believeTM

Time started in the late 1770s... as the First Nations were being slaughtered?

Also, early childhood deaths are counted. Abortions are not counted. This skews the chart. I would like to see a chart that goes back to 1 million years ago, and compensates for all intentional child death and early childhood death.

How long would an adult hope to live, and how much of that time was his own?
#15206969
JohnRawls wrote:You need to understand that Qatz is a primitivist in a sense that he advocates for removal all of technology from society and return to hunter-gatherer way of life which might or might not include crop cultivation because that damages society and climate.

Agreed. Yet another of these silly threads with the main purpose of complaining about how bad humanity, civilization and technology is. After a few posts, he will get tired and open yet another thread to complain about the same issue. Meanwhile, some of us will be left stranded in the whole of nonsense created. There is no thoughtful discussion about policy, politics, economics. It is all an endless cry of how capitalism sucks, how humanity sucks, how profit sucks, how the US sucks, how technology sucks, how corporations sucks.
#15206971
QatzelOk wrote:
Exactly.

Also, what the author bemoans, in the author's original words: "...current government healthcare programs..."

So he is not saying that healthcare has no place, or that government has no role. He is saying that the current way we do medicine is all wrong and resource consumptive.

The Lies We All BelieveTM are usually profit-driven. And it's no different in current health care practices, no matter what the current funding model (though the USA is near worst and contaminates all the others).

I think Cuba may have solved this with Revolutionary Medicine. But few other nations have. They are all to beholden to making doctors rich, shareholders rich, or bureaucrats rich.


QatzelOk wrote:
Time started in the late 1770s... as the First Nations were being slaughtered?



There's no need to spuriously impugn 'time' -- yes, the West fomented titanic *genocide* against indigenous people everywhere they went, mostly for the expansion of capital and international jockeying for colonial possessions.


QatzelOk wrote:
Also, early childhood deaths are counted. Abortions are not counted. This skews the chart. I would like to see a chart that goes back to 1 million years ago, and compensates for all intentional child death and early childhood death.



Well, nit-picking isn't any kind of argument -- the overall development of life expectancy as shown in the data is *unambiguous*, and, yes, it corresponded with industrialization and Western genocidal practices.


QatzelOk wrote:
How long would an adult hope to live, and how much of that time was his own?



Are you indicating 'alienation' here?
#15207087
ckaihatsu wrote:There's no need to spuriously impugn 'time' -- yes, the West fomented titanic *genocide* against indigenous people everywhere they went, mostly for the expansion of capital and international jockeying for colonial possessions./quote]
The "lifespan" graph the you provided starts in the 1770s - a time of genocides of First Nations. So it was pretty easy to "improve" from genocidal levels of death after that. Likewise, millions of Euros were dying on boats during this period, trying to leave their "sinking boat" rat-hole existences in Europe.

So it's very manipulative to compare "today" with "that time when we were killing millions and dying on boats by the millions."

It's like saying that you feel a lot better than you did five days ago, when five days ago, you were sitting in the bottom of a volcano fighting the flames. Duh. No kidding.

But how is your condition now? How was it "before you fell into the volcano?"

Because if all you want to do is feel better than you did when you were in the volcano, you are not aiming very high at all. In fact, you are accepting "falling into a volcano" as the default lifestyle choice.

Your graph accepts genocide and expulsion of millions of poor people - as some kind of romantic norm. Most lifestyle graphs do this. Most anthropolgists do this as well.


The lifespan of an Irish immigrant to Canada in the 1800s would see his "adult" lifespan reduced by 20 years, from 70 in Ireland to 50 in Canada.

But the intentionally-starved-to-death Irish worker peasant produced so much during those 50 years of factory slavehood, that no one dared tell him that his life was shorter than any previous generation of people from Ireland who made it past childhood.

The famines are recorded as "naturally occurring" and thus, untouchable - like a lot of our LIES.
#15207229
10. While its indeed a good idea to make sure everyone has enough, no matter how well you provide, you would of course still have (less) criminals.

9. While we should indeed get rid of classes, making sure that people dont suffer shortage requires organizing proper distribution to everyone.

8. Yes. Solution ?

7. Yes.

6. Why yes, but war offers big time business opportunities to rich people. The USA doesnt even want to win wars anymore, just waging them so rich people can get richer is enough for them. The USA waged war in Afghanistan for 20 years for no good reason whatsoever.

5. A very arbritary statement. In what regard "better" ?

4. Its not economic growth thats the problem. Its lack of recycling, making sure resources get reused. No matter the growth or shrinking, thats whats lacking.

3. Well, you can have laws against racism, just like you can have laws against violence. However, fighting racism in people, thats a pastime for people who have nothing better to do. You cannot actually get rid of human ignorance. By the way, class conceit is a substantially bigger problem than racism.

2. Thats a very arbritary statement.

1. Good luck proving that.
#15207446
Negotiator wrote:4. Its not economic growth thats the problem. Its lack of recycling, making sure resources get reused. No matter the growth or shrinking, thats whats lacking.

I know you were trying to provide a counterpoint to the listed idea that infinite growth is, in fact, impossible -- and that infinite growth is even desirable is a lie within a lie.

Infinite growith is not possible, nor is it desirable.

But you have revealed one of the strategies of the Lie Defenders that we all are; they use some newfound "patch" to explain how the problems would all just blow away if only that patch was larger than Jupiter and made of platinum.

Why are so many of us Lie-generators? Could the Ten Lies have also created Liars among the followers of the Lies?

Mattias Desmet wrote:...the psychological process of mass formation got stronger and stronger throughout the last two centuries and eventually leads to totalitarian thinking and in the end also to the emergence of totalitarian states.


Does Totalitarian thinking lead us to become *Preachers of Lies* ourselves?
#15207591
the OP wrote:6. Violent efforts to improve the world are usually far less effective, successful, or lasting than nonviolent efforts, and the idea that violence can be justified is a delusion sustained by entertainment and unthinking anger.


One example of the violent "improvement" of the world by the British Empire... reinforces the idea that *maybe* these don't improve anything at all.

Larry Romanoff wrote:It was Victoria who approved the destruction of China's Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, and the looting of its more than ten million of the finest and most valuable historical treasures and scholarly works from 5,000 years of Chinese history, in retaliation for Chinese resistance to her opium. It was the same woman (the family) who engineered an even greater crime against the history of Chinese knowledge – the destruction of the library and the Yongle Dadian at the Hanlin Academy. That encyclopedia of 22,000 volumes written by more than 2,000 scholars over many years, contained much of the total of 5,000 years of Chinese knowledge, invention and thought. It was Queen Victoria's military who carried all those books outdoors, poured fuel on them, and burnt the entire collection to ashes as punishment for refusing opium.

So Queen Victoria - destroyer of 150 cultures through genocides - gets angry that the Chinese refuse to consumer the opium that the British have forced India to grow. So angry, that she has her army destroy 5,000 years of Chinese knowledge.

I think this event alone shows what a LIE that British Empîre was built on. And by extension, the efforts to "improve the world" by superpowers are typically like this.... atrocities that put humanity's future into question.

Lies about your heroic leaders and nation.... are as addictive as opium.
#15207599
QatzelOk wrote:One example of the violent "improvement" of the world by the British Empire... reinforces the idea that *maybe* these don't improve anything at all.


So Queen Victoria - destroyer of 150 cultures through genocides - gets angry that the Chinese refuse to consumer the opium that the British have forced India to grow. So angry, that she has her army destroy 5,000 years of Chinese knowledge.

I think this event alone shows what a LIE that British Empîre was built on. And by extension, the efforts to "improve the world" by superpowers are typically like this.... atrocities that put humanity's future into question.

Lies about your heroic leaders and nation.... are as addictive as opium.


You correctly identify the shortcomings of humanity. However, I very strongly disagree with your approach and/or constant bashing.
Let me point out, that "Queen Victoria destroyer..." is not an isolated event in history... it is not like Spanish and Portuguese were particularly gentle on the people that they colonized, destruction of the library of Alexandria or the countless of events religious fanatics silenced or even killed those that came up with other ideas. Just to mention a tiny number of the thousands of examples that we could dwell on discussing.
We, humanity, are at the center of all of this, but we are also the victim. We live in a violent world. Long before humanity came into existence, this world was already violent for billions of years. Look around you... with the exception of plants (and sometimes even plants!) just about anything else that has life around you depends on killing something else for their survival.
Remember that time Microsoft created a hateful bot? https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/1129 ... bot-racist
Well, they didn't. They created a bot that could have learned anything but the environment was such that it learned to be a nasty bitch.
I think this parallels humans. We evolved on a planet that has been constantly trying to kill us and we learned this. The good news, is that we are able to recognize our issues and have been improving upon them consistently. Generation after generation, we are improving.
Bitching and complaining is not really helpful.
#15207601
XogGyux wrote:You correctly identify the shortcomings of humanity.

That's not my intent at all.

I am posting evidence that humanity has been fed lies, which has made it choose badly.

"Deceit" leads to bad choices - and this has nothing to do with "being human." In fact, the powerful liars who enforce these lies... are probably so damaged that to call them "human" is to lie about their condition being a natural one.

It has nothing to do with being homo sapien. It has to do with falling into a bad system of human slavery and being fooled into self-destruction and failure by a fabricated elite - a group which is only noteworthy because of its extinction-threatening lack of empathy and other mental problems.

That the British Empire - at the peak of its power - was forcing Indians to grow drugs and forcing the Chinese to consume these drugs - demonstrates the big lie of "heroic empires."

And this is part of Lie # 7 - Violence can improve the world

If you live in a rich country, you probably believe this important, empire-sustaining lie.
#15207603
QatzelOk wrote:I am posting evidence that humanity has been fed lies, which has made it choose badly.

Fed by who or what?
Don't you realize it is us (humanity) that has been doing this that you always complain about? And we have been doing this to ourselves since the beginning of recorded history (and presumably from the beginning of civilization)?
#15207605
XogGyux wrote:Let me point out, that "Queen Victoria destroyer..." is not an isolated event in history... it is not like Spanish and Portuguese were particularly gentle on the people that they colonized, destruction of the library of Alexandria or the countless of events religious fanatics silenced or even killed those that came up with other ideas. Just to mention a tiny number of the thousands of examples that we could dwell on discussing.


I don't know that I buy it. My grand father who was a journalist for the Army Times and whose major was The Great Books claimed that the intentional burning of the Alexandria Library was a myth. He actually claimed it fell into the sea.

Sounds far fetched and I was always taught it burned or was burned.

Another example is the burning of the Bagdad library and looting of the museum after the 2003 American invasion.

Look around you... with the exception of plants (and sometimes even plants!) just about anything else that has life around you depends on killing something else for their survival.

Especially Venus Flytraps are rather violent.
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