a few disjointed thoughts on thought…

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

-Gore Vidal, writer

Do actions still speak louder than words? Or have we become a culture of rhetoric, of double speak and crimethought? I think we have changed, because clearly we have voted, repeatedly, against our own social, economic, and moral interests.

Carl Sandburg said, “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” What would that take? What would it take, generally, for us all to stop listening to the lies and the lying liars who tell them? Can you think of any prominent public figure who doesn’t automatically get attention?

I know I’m rambling here a little, but it’s late. Let me try again.

We are deeply in love with our sources and means of distraction: Internet, TV, wireless, radio, etc. We can’t get enough. We’ve become passive receptors of every signal and feed, incapable of discernment or critical judgment. We simply absorb at an overwhelming and ever-increasing rate and volume. It’s in the paper, it must be important, it must apply to me. The President said it, that settles it. It never occurs to the average consumer of information to simply say Wait, hold on, let’s stop and think about this a minute. The government has obliterated privacy and now controls much of the media of communication. Something’s wrong.

Oh, it’s a matter of perspective. I says what’s coming through this screen at you right now, and what’s pounded out at you from the Ministry of Truth is not reality. No. Reality is that heat behind your eyes, that feeling in your chest when I say Grandmother.

The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages. – Richard Bach

So if the world is not reality, and everyone is free to lie – truth being relative and matter made of nothing – then what does it matter if we listen to people like Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld? Because we are creatures of mind; our thoughts and our free will are all we really have. And love. We can’t allow anyone to control our thoughts, or hijack our free will, any more than we would thoughtlessly allow somehow to beat our physical body with a baseball bat. It’s not that they’re lying that’s the problem. It’s that we’re conditioned to believe. So either we mute the bastards, or we don’t show up with they give the war.