Remember

graffiti

imposed opinion & conventional nescience

• Remember Galileo’s arrest for showing evidence to support the heliocentric theory of the solar system?

• Remember the witch hunts of Salem, during the Medieval; remember the Inquisition?

• Remember the promise of democracy, human rights and civil liberties?

• Remember how the Nazi party got over 17 million votes, 43.9% of the total, more than any other party, in 1933?

• Remember during the 1940 USA presidential campaign Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised, “We will not send our armed forces to fight in lands across the sea.” and pledged “your boys are not going to be sent into a foreign war?”⁽¹⁾

• Remember how sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll were believed to be the end of western civilization?

• Remember how the whole world celebrated the new millennium an entire year too early?

• Remember the weapons of mass destruction that never existed?

• Remember the confidence and optimism of the 1920s, the 1990s, in WorldCom, Enron, the Dot-com frenzy, in the sub-prime-Bear-Stearns-Lehman Brothers-world banking system-real estate bubble?

• Remember all the failed, never to come true predictions of every famed psychic, clairvoyant, telepath, prophet and prognosticator?

• Remember the low-fat diet, the high-fat diet, the grapefruit diet, low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the alkaline diet, the raw diet, each one guaranteed to get you back in shape?

• Remember the fill-in-the-blank-with-your-favorite deception and/or mass madness belief?

• Remember the recent waves of strongly emotionalized opinions circulating in the media?

Oh wait, it’s too soon to forget. Can’t remember what you haven’t forgotten. It takes years, sometimes decades, for the clouds of confusion to settle enough to see through the conflicting opinions, cherry-picked data, and absolute certainty of half-truths.

the masses

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. —Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. — Oscar Wilde

the media