Thursday, December 07, 2006
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IN DENIAL
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Even when I behaved like an idiot I thought I was being smart, and I thought I was being smart because I was in denial. And I am in denial today at this very moment when I think my words may change someone’s mind.
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To be in denial is an easy concept to understand but difficult to detect in oneself. Censorship is a symptom of denial that masquerades as dedication, respect, and love of truth. If you say 2 plus 2 makes 4, and I say it makes 22, you don’t feel threatened. You may even smile. That’s because when truth is on your side, you don’t feel threatened by lies. But if you believe in an ideology or religion and someone questions its validity, you are tempted to punch him in the nose because you are afraid to be exposed as a jackass who has been betting on the wrong horse.
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Tribes, nations, empires, and civilizations can be in denial as surely as megalomaniacs (which means being in denial of one’s mediocrity). I have a Jewish friend who is as close to me as a brother that I never had. We have exchanged hundreds perhaps even thousands of letters and e-mails. But whenever I question the validity of Jews being God’s Chosen People he refuses to talk to me for months.
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The USSR was harsh on its dissidents not because it valued truth over lies but because it saw truth as a threat. How could a few words by (in their official estimation) harmless eccentrics and misfits in need of psychiatric care shake the foundations of a mighty empire?
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To believe in propaganda amounts to saying all propagandists are liars except ours, who are men of honor and butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, or anywhere else for that matter.
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The aim of propaganda is to legitimize, promote, and reinforce a state of denial, but since everyone, except perhaps a handful of individuals who have mastered the demanding art of thinking for themselves, subscribes to a propaganda line, being in denial is considered a perfectly normal and healthy condition.
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Under normal conditions murder is a capital offense, but in time of war soldiers are brainwashed by propagandists to believe that 2 plus 2 makes 22 and if anyone dares to disagree, he will be accused of treason, which happens to be a capital offense too. There you have it, another case of Catch-22.
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I think it was Aldous Huxley who once observed that our planet is the insane asylum of the galaxy. If you reject or question the truth in this observation, it may be because you happen to be in denial.
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Friday, December 08, 2006
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ON BELIEF SYSTEMS AND
RELATED ATROCITIES
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It is an undeniable fact that some of our most cherished ideas about God and Country, or religion and patriotism, were instilled in us at a time when we had not yet mastered the demanding art of thinking for ourselves, and as such they should be rejected as “prejudicial” and “hearsay” because not to do so would mean allowing geography to determine our belief system. It is another undeniable fact that geography or mountains, valleys, and flatlands do not and cannot think. It follows; to allow an unthinking factor to define our thinking is not just wrong but absurd. And yet, this is what the overwhelming majority of mankind does. Result, intolerance, conflicts, wars, massacres, and atrocities with no end in sight; or, to put it more bluntly, lies in the name of truth, and the Kingdom of the Devil instead of the City of God.
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Having seen this clearly, the eminent historian Arnold J. Toynbee concluded his monumental STUDY OF HISTORY with an appeal to mankind to reconcile all known religions into a single universal religion by granting equal status to all scriptures, prophets, and messianic figures. Needless to add, he was labeled a mystic, a prophet of mumbo jumbo, and a utopian daydreamer.
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Was Toynbee a utopian mystic or a realist and pragmatist? He was, I believe, both. He was a realist in so far as he saw that what moves tribes, nations, empires, and civilizations is a belief system rather than self-interest, and as long as there are conflicting belief systems there cannot be lasting peace. He was a utopian mystic in so far as he thought man, as a reasonable being would be more than willing to give up his arrogant, not to say, groundless belief that he had a monopoly on truth for whose sake he would rather see the world go down in flames rather than to live in perpetual peace and prosperity.
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Saturday, December 09, 2006
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HUBRIS AND NEMESIS
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Ignorance of the law, including the moral law, especially the moral law, is no excuse. If you commit a transgression you can’t plead not guilty by reason of ignorance or unawareness. When the Greeks were defeated, humiliated, and enslaved by such “barbarians” as Macedonians, Romans, and Turks, it may not have occurred to them that their hubris in assuming to be the most civilized nation on earth may have provoked the retaliation of Nemesis. Have these catastrophes of millennial duration taught the Greeks a lesson? I don’t think so. Even in their present bastardized condition, they think, as the offspring of the greatest people on earth, they have every right to brag about their many contributions to world civilization.
To justify their hubris of considering themselves the Chosen, some learned Jews explain that they don’t mean it as an enviable privilege but, on the contrary, as a heavy burden and a thankless responsibility. But I agree with Toynbee: no matter how you slice it, baloney is baloney. Greeks, Jews, Brits, Nazis, Armenians: they are chosen by no one but themselves and no amount of sophistry can cover up or justify their arrogance. Which is why I shiver with disgust when I hear an Armenian bragging about how smart we are, how many languages we speak, how successful we have been in surviving where many others perished, first nation this, and first nation that. Why would anyone brag about being slaughtered by “bloodthirsty savages”? And smart in what? Selling Oriental rugs? It seems our need to brag is such that when we run out of positives, we brag about negatives.
How smart are we when we say the best and only way to solve our many problems is to sit on our collective ass for two or three generations until our problems solve themselves. Human problems do not solve themselves. It takes hard work and sometimes even blood, sweat, and tears. An average idiot with the minimum of political awareness knows this. But leave it to smart Armenians to pretend ignorance and unawareness.
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