a dialog about beliefs

2009-08-22

Richard Moore


Greetings,

I’ve been in dialog with a correspondent who shall go unnamed, as it is a private conversation. However I imagine there are many out there who might find the conversation of interest, so I’d like to share it with you. Beginning in mid-stream..
x: it’s just that we view the world in very different ways..

rkm: but facts are facts. it’s not just a matter of opinion.

x: besides, if i simply agreed that, in the words of dick durban describing congress, “the banks frankly own the place,” i wouldn’t have anything else to talk about…. 🙂

rkm: Is that so? What you mean is that you don’t want to think about it. If you do think about it, there’s quite a bit to talk about.

x: no offense intended, but you don’t know me and you appear to have no idea how folks that view the world differently than you process info…

rkm: Right you are, and I’ve been trying for a long time to understand that very thing. Your comments are helpful.

x: ..but if i simply say “the banks own the place” and the media and the country, [or some shadow organization rules the whole world] there’s no reason to watch how, say health care plays out…or discuss the pluses and minuses of the nhs…or the drug war or right wing disinformation astroturfing squads…..it’s too trivial to spend any time on…i’m not about to start stuffing gold coins in my mattress or join in some sort of armed uprising…so why worry about anything if the game is already over and the other side won…..

rkm: The thing is that either the banks own the place or they don’t. Isn’t it important to you to know which is true? It turns out that gold coins and armed uprisings would not be the appropriate response if the banks do own things. There would be other responses that make a lot more sense, but we won’t be considering those if we don’t get an answer to the question. 

Your statement is basically saying that since you can’t think of a response off the top of your head, you’ll just assume the banks don’t run things and proceed on that basis. This leads to ignoring the question, ignoring the evidence, and failing to consider the possibility, or what a response would be. With no offense intended, this is intentionally burying your head in the sand. 

The ‘other side’ has won the traditional game of politics and government, but they haven’t won the final outcome if we wake up to what they’re doing. It is our denial that is enabling them to move to the finish line.

Thanks for your candor. I think you speak for the progressive majority, and no one else has expressed the position clearly.

x: thanks for the response…i’ve been a bit testy…..

rkm: I bring that out in people. Worth it when we get past it.

x: i’ll admit i’m a bit uncomfortable speaking for any progressives other than myself…i’m not that assertive….but i will stand behind my opinions if i believe them well-grounded in reality

rkm: Most of us do. If we do it in a spirit of debate, then no one learns anything. If we do it in the spirit of ‘exposing our truth’, and are open to seeing flaws in our assumptions, then everyone may learn something. 

x: but, cutting to the chase….actually i DO think the banks own the place…

rkm: Hmmm, this catches me by surprise. I do try to understand how people think, because that’s important to my writing and my work in general. ‘head in sand’ is too simplistic in your case, my hypothesis has been squashed. So, you do think they own the place, but you don’t want to really own that belief, because then you can’t see a path of action?

x: [which shows the danger of your assumption making, no offense]

rkm: They are dangerous if you hold them as truths, and defend them with debate. If you hold them as hypotheses, they are very useful. They give you handles to hook new information to, so everything isn’t just a jumble of facts. It’s like in Astronomy, you don’t just randomly point the telescope and hope to see something. You have an hypothesis, and you look in places where it can be proved or disproved.

x: ….and i’m not sure how to proceed…i can’t bitch to my elected representative about it [he’s republican] and my senators aren’t much better [a retiring repub and a wishy-washy dem.]
i guess i’ll continue to hope to get the best government i can hope for under the circumstances….that might sound snide, but it isn’t meant to be…

rkm: It’s important to understand how long the banks have owned things. If it were just happening recently, around the collapse and bailouts, that would be one thing. Something we could recover from, one might think. But in Europe it’s been true for centuries, and in the US since 1913. And it’s not the bank on the corner, or Bank of America, or Wells Fargo. It’s the Central Banks, and some of the crony investment firms. Bilderberger is not where they make plans, it’s where they reveal plans and start waves moving among their lackey politicians and journalists. 

It’s a handful of family dynasties, and they planned WWI and WWII and financed both sides, which gives some feeling for the scope of their control. I learned this from multiple reliable sources, not from Alex Jones. The good thing about Alex, is that he lays it all out concisely and clearly. Too bad he’s such a turn-off to educated people, in terms of his style and personal beliefs. But the personal beliefs and personality of messengers are not the tests of a message.

When we understand how long this has been going on, then we must re-appraise our experience of ‘social progress’. We didn’t have it good in the 50s and 60s because there had been social progress and a rise of democracy. We had it good because that was the post-WWII plan for us: exploit the third world’s resources and people while giving the West prosperity so they could consume a lot, and the illusion of liberty so they wouldn’t question the system. 

When that game became unprofitable (for the banks), they sent in Reagan and began taking it all away, systematically, piece by piece. Only one President since 1913 challenged their power, and he got shot it in the head. The rest of them, without exception, have been simply mouthpieces for the banks. FDR would take more discussion, but in the end he claimed his greatest achievement was ‘saving capitalism’. 

Unfortunately, the best government we can hope for is a government run by the banks. That’s why we need to think beyond the existing political system. 

x: .it would be a lot easier if we had better mainstream media in this country, but i digress

rkm: If we had better mainstream media, we’d be in a different universe, with different dominant forces, and I digress as well.

x: tossing this back to you…if guns and gold isn’t the right response, what is? [again, NOT being snide…]

rkm: I appreciate that you’re not being snide. I’m not either.

I think about these things logically, starting from the problem. If the political system and the media are useless to us, then we must look elsewhere. 

Mass movements based on leadership and a program have been tried many times, and they don’t work. Either they get co-opted, or when they win, we get a new tyranny based on the leadership and their program, which always shifts from ‘all animals are equal’ to ‘some animals are more equal than others’.

Third parties don’t work, because they’re a subset of mass movements, as described above.

Public education and ‘changing everyone’s consciousness’ doesn’t work because of the dominance of the mass media, and its ability to scare people away from any radical ideas that start to achieve currency. The knee-jerk response of progressives to ‘conspiracy theories’ is an example of this ability of the media.

Basically anything that’s organized on a large scale cannot work. That’s their playground and they are masters at those games, besides having the most chips to play with.

I had great hopes for the Internet, but it doesn’t work either. It has the potential, in some sense, but we end up with choirs talking to choirs, or social networking and entertainment, rather than sound ideas becoming dominant.

So, as I see it, our path to an adequate response – – if one exists –– must lie in the grassroots, in a bottom-up, non-leader, non-program movement of coming together. When it comes to wanting healthy communities, everyone agrees – left, right, black, white, women, men, adults and children. The things that divide us are artificial things, promulgated by media, and echoed by politicians. The create debates on health care and the rest, so we can argue about it –– with no effect –– while they carry on with their preset agenda. 

Only when we all stand together can we overcome their power, and it’s only in our communities, on a face-to-face basis, that we can begin to find our common ground.

as i see it,
richard

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