07-13-2024, 09:54 PM
Reality Is Not a Social Construct
By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
July 1, 2024
Human behavior is, to a large extent, socially constructed. People often act based on social norms, expectations, or habits rather than by attempting to ascertain the nature of reality itself. In that context, it is true to say that people’s perceptions of reality are socially constructed, as explained by the Thomas theorem:
Another way of looking at this concept is through W.I. Thomas’s notable Thomas theorem which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928). That is, people’s behavior can be determined by their subjective construction of reality rather than by objective reality.
In “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics,” Murray Rothbard defines praxeology as “the logical implications of the universal formal fact that people act, that they employ means to try to attain chosen ends.” People attempt to make decisions based on their best evaluation of the reality of the situation. If we have a good grasp of that reality, our decisions are likely to lead toward our goals; a weak grasp of reality is likely to yield disastrous decisions. Rothbard observes that “all that praxeology asserts is that the individual actor adopts goals and believes, whether erroneously or correctly, that he can arrive at them by the employment of certain means” (emphasis added). Our perception of reality may be erroneous or correct. When we fall into error, we do our best to review and correct our perception of reality in order to make better decisions in the future. This commonsense principle is reflected in the popular slogan FAFO: “FAFO is an acronym for ‘eff around and find out.’ It’s a cheeky way to tell people that if they play with fire, they might get burned—or to announce that they already have been.”
The commonsense view that our decisions are influenced by cultural and social norms is often overstated to convey the mistaken idea that there is no such thing as objective reality: reality itself is a social construct that depends on how you perceive or define it. This partly reflects a form of recklessness—abandoning the effort to investigate or distinguish true from false—sometimes because inquiry is deemed too costly and sometimes from a desire to avoid interpersonal or intergroup conflict by proclaiming that everyone is correct. It suits the egalitarian ethos of our time to declare that everyone has the right answer. I have “my truth,” and you have yours. In mathematics, teachers have been urged to be inclusive by teaching pupils that there are no right or wrong answers.
White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when the focus is on getting the “right” answer. . . . The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.
If everyone has different subjective perceptions of reality and it is not clear whose perceptions are correct and whose are erroneous, it often seems easiest to aver that nobody is right or wrong. If all “realities” are personally and socially constructed, then each person gets to choose his own reality, and everyone is a winner. Thus, we must accept that if anyone says he is a woman because he feels like a woman, then that is his reality. He really is a woman.
This idea that reality is a social construct prevails in public discourse and all fields of academic inquiry. Further, the fact that subjective perceptions of reality are influenced by factors such as a person’s intelligence, culture, and life experiences leads many to the mistaken conclusion that there is nothing self-evident in the world. Everything is up for debate, and the best we can do is to describe our personal “lived experiences.”
Hence comes the nostrum “do not believe your lying eyes”—after all, I may claim to see something different from what you see, and therefore, you should not believe anything exists just because you see it right there in front of you. Perceptions could be mistaken; therefore, nobody knows what is real. It would take decades of empirical peer-reviewed academic study to discover what is real.
For example, for all you know, you might not be a man but just a butterfly dreaming that you are a man. What proof do you have that you are not a butterfly? What credentials qualify you to distinguish between a man and a butterfly?
A story tells that Zhuang Zhou once dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy, and doing as he pleased. As a butterfly, he did not know he was Zhuang Zhou. All of a sudden, he awoke and found he was Zhuang Zhou, solid and unmistakably human. But then he did not know whether he was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.
Ultimately, Zhuang Zhou must accept the evidence of his own eyes as it is not possible for a sane person persistently to lie to himself. As Rothbard observes:
Of course, a person may say that he denies the existence of self-evident principles or other established truths of the real world, but this mere saying has no epistemological validity. As Toohey pointed out, “A man may say anything he pleases, but he cannot think or do anything he pleases. He may say he saw a round square, but he cannot think he saw a round square. He may say, if he likes, that he saw a horse riding astride its own back, but we shall know what to think of him if he says it.”
Those who are currently embarked upon empirical studies to prove the existence of the ninety-nine different sexes and genders have already mapped out the spectrum:
The sex designation of your brain and body may not be as black and white as scientists have believed it to be. Instead gender may fall somewhere on a gray scale. Scientists are trying to unravel the complex biological breakdowns of gender, and as they learn more, it’s becoming more apparent there aren’t just men and women among us.
A scientific analysis of what is a woman titled “White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study” informs us that “the white matter microstructure pattern in untreated FtM [female to male] transsexuals is closer to the pattern of subjects who share their gender identity (males) than those who share their biological sex (females). Our results provide evidence for an inherent difference in the brain structure of FtM transsexuals.”
This explains why Justice Ketanji Jackson, when asked “What is a woman?” replied that she is not a biologist and thus could not answer the question. If a justice of the Supreme Court publicly asserts that she does not know what a woman is, the implication is that this is a question best left to the credentialed experts.
The aim of “reality is a social construct” ideologues is to persuade ordinary people that they cannot know or understand reality without immersing themselves in top-level academic study that, conveniently, is currently under the tight control of socialists. For example, you cannot know or understand the meaning of justice until you have devoted years to studying the work of the expert on justice, John Rawls. When Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was published, Ayn Rand observed:
Let me say that I have not read and do not intend to read that book. . . . Is A Theory of Justice likely to be widely read? No. Is it likely to be influential? Yes—precisely for that reason. . . . if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the approval—all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions.
The same may be said of many great works that are treated as the unofficial mark of credibility for anyone who wants to comment on current affairs or political events. You must study John Maynard Keynes to discover whether there is inflation and, if so, whether inflation is good for you—do not just believe your lying wallet. You must study all eight volumes of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s General History of Africa before you can comment on whether socialism will work in Africa and study Karl Marx’s Das Kapital to form an opinion on whether communism will work in Africa if it is “done properly.”
While the complexity of science is self-evident, and acquiring a comprehensive understanding of any discipline requires many years of study, it does not follow that human beings cannot know or understand reality until a credentialed expert informs them of the “correct” view of the facts. Moreover, as David Gordon illustrates in his essay “Butler, Butt Out,” expert theorists who deny the existence of objective principles often lead their readers up the garden path:
It is often quite difficult to understand what she is saying. Here is a sample passage, by no means the most obscure in the book: “A phantasmatic sliding—what [Jacques] Lacan calls glissement—happens amid the kinds of arguments considered above. Are they even arguments? Or must we see the way that the syntax of the phantasm orders, and derails, the sequence of an argument?”
Faced with prose of this kind, the familiar words of Juvenal come to mind: Difficile est satiram non scribere.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/07/no_a...construct/
Varying Interpretations of Truth, or Truth as a Social Construct
By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
July 3, 2024
In this age of relativism, where one often hears reference to “your truth” and “my truth,” there are so many varying interpretations of truth that the concept of truth itself seems devoid of meaning. It is fashionable to see the concept of truth as indistinguishable from opinions or preferences. For example, Mari Fitzduff writes that
for many of us, far from our beliefs being “true,” they are actually born out of a particular social context, allied to physiological needs such as a differing neural sensitivity to threats and the greater certainty that a group can provide. Thus, beliefs are often what is termed “groupish” rather than necessarily true.
The task of deciding which group has the “true” version of facts is then left to expert fact-checkers who will pronounce on what is true or false.
In that light, it is easy to see why those who update dictionaries seek to reflect the common usage of words, rather than to reflect what is true. Dictionary definitions do not purport to be true nor do they claim to reflect any underlying universal truth underpinning the words defined; they are simply statements of how words are conventionally used. For example, the Cambridge Dictionary defines a woman as “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”—that is how the word “woman” is now commonly used, and being defined in that way by the dictionary does not mean that anyone who lives and identifies as female is, in truth, a woman.
Aristotle famously defined truth as facts corresponding with reality: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” In “Mises and the Diminished a Priori,” David Gordon defines an a priori proposition as
a proposition that can be known to be true just by thinking about it: you don’t need to examine the world to see whether it’s true. “2 + 2 = 4” is a priori true: once you understand what the proposition says, you can grasp that it’s true. You don’t need to keep counting objects to see whether the claimed equality holds true.
What does it mean to describe a proposition as true in that sense? In describing praxeological axioms as true, the word “truth” is deployed to mean that “if A implies B, and A is true, then B must also be true.” Science strives for accuracy and tests its propositions empirically or logically to ensure that they are accurate and valid and seeks to establish the correct facts. In ordinary language, we say it is true that 2 + 2 = 4, but “truth” in that context only means accuracy. It expresses a scientific principle that is true in the sense that equating 2 + 2 with 4 is the only formula that works. Anyone who accepts the suggestion of decolonized mathematics that 2 + 2 = 5, or indeed any number we want, would soon find their planes falling out of the sky and their infrastructure collapsing.
Beyond that, the question of what it would mean to say that science strives for “truth” is contested among philosophers. Indeed, many philosophers would say that there is no ultimate truth, in that what is said to be true is always open to question. In The Intellectuals and Socialism, Friedrich von Hayek explains why intellectuals are inclined to question everything:
Orthodoxy of any kind, any pretense that a system of ideas is final and must be unquestioningly accepted as a whole, is the one view which of necessity antagonizes all intellectuals, whatever their views on particular issues. Any system which judges men by the completeness of their conformity to a fixed set of opinions, by their “soundness” or the extent to which they can be relied upon to hold approved views on all points, deprives itself of a support without which no set of ideas can maintain its influence in modern society. The ability to criticize accepted views, to explore new vistas and to experience with new conceptions, provides the atmosphere without which the intellectual cannot breathe.
In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises also explains that neither the natural nor social sciences are concerned with truth in the philosophical sense: “Granted that science cannot give us truth—and who knows what truth really means—at any rate it is certain that it works in leading us to success.” Thus, praxeology, the science of human action, does not seek the truth in the grand “meaning of life” sense that characterizes many philosophical perspectives and perhaps all religions. In Mises’s view, praxeology does not “claim to reveal information about the true, objective, and absolute meaning of life.” Instead, praxeology “is neutral with regard to all judgments of value and the choice of ultimate ends. Its task is not to approve or to disapprove, but only to establish facts.”
Many liberals are also wary of the concept of “truth” and avoid it altogether not only because they are relativists who reject the notion of objective truth, but also because the concept of “truth” is associated in popular discourse with things people must do. Many people think that if something is true, then it follows logically that others must be forced to do it. For example, they would think that as soon as it is established to be true that something is harmful to health, it follows that it must be banned to force people to promote good health. Thus, the enemies of liberty often march under the banner of truth, armed with true principles about what is needed to promote human health. Liberty falls by the wayside. It is true that smoking is harmful to health, and on that basis, the Tory Party in the United Kingdom wants to ban it. As Rothbard warned:
And remember, if today they come for the smoker, tomorrow they will come for you. If today they grab your cigarette, tomorrow they will seize your junk food, your carbohydrates, your yummy but “empty” calories . . . Are you ready for the Left Nutritional Kingdom, with everyone forced to confine his food to yoghurt and tofu and bean sprouts? Are you ready to be confined in a cage, to make sure that your diet is perfect, and that you get the prescribed Compulsory Exercise?
Rothbard warns against this “neo-Puritanical” combining of the theological quest for truth with the statist quest for power: the power of the state to tell everyone what they must do.
In the postmodern age, far from being devoted to the pursuit of truth, statists promote the ideology that truth is anything you want and that each of us can therefore have our own version of the truth. They are devoted not to the pursuit of truth but to the version of “truth” that they think will promote their political goals. As Lew Rockwell observes: “In class after class, the postmodern message is the same: what we call truth is wholly subjective, what we call science is merely the momentary professional consensus, and what we call reality is a fiction made up to sooth our psychological need for order in the universe.”
Far from being designed to embrace the truth, postmodernism rejects the very notion that anything is true.
The Reality of Human Action
By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
July 10, 2024
The concept of reality is questioned by the notion, as László Krasznahorkai expressed it, that there are “many realities, or none at all.” By contrast, in Human Action, Ludwig von Mises offers a clear concept of reality, which he describes as “the whole complex of all causal relations between events, which wishful thinking cannot alter.” Building on this idea, Murray Rothbard argues that the entire science of human action can be deduced from a few basic axioms that are true about the real world. Real in this context means, as Mises says, “in the eyes of man, all that he cannot alter and to whose existence he must adjust his action if he wants to attain his ends.”
Rothbard’s argument is that in the real world, some inescapable basic truths are self-evident, and from these basic axioms, we can derive further true principles based on the logic that “if A is true, and A implies B, then B is true.” For example, praxeologists assert that “individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals.” From this basic axiom, which praxeologists take to be absolutely and universally true, they deduce further principles about human action. Rothbard argues
(a) that the fundamental axioms and premises of economics are absolutely true;
(b) that the theorems and conclusions deduced by the laws of logic from these postulates are therefore absolutely true;
© that there is consequently no need for empirical “testing,” either of the premises or the conclusions; and
(d) that the deduced theorems could not be tested even if it were desirable.
Leaving aside debates about whether these axioms have any empirical content, some critics have countered that praxeologists cannot possibly know whether their fundamental axioms and premises are absolutely true in the first place, as stated in Rothbard’s proposition (a). After all, a good Popperian knows that no scientific principle can be stated as absolutely true because a scientist could come along tomorrow and show that it is not true after all. The lesson to be derived from the awkward business involving Galileo Galilei and the Roman Catholic Inquisition, so the critics assert, is that we should never assume anything to be absolutely true. This contestation is summarized by Rothbard as follows:
In physics, therefore, postulated explanations have to be hypothesized in such a way that they or their consequents can be empirically tested. Even then, the laws are only tentatively rather than absolutely valid.
. . . On the other hand, economics, or praxeology, has full and complete knowledge of its original and basic axioms. These are the axioms implicit in the very existence of human action, and they are absolutely valid so long as human beings exist.
Praxeologists are clear that they make no claim to be omniscient. In Human Action, Mises explains: “The honest and conscientious truth-seekers have never pretended that reason and scientific research can answer all questions. They were fully aware of the limitations imposed on the human mind.” Nor do they claim to be infallible, as Mises explains that “human reason is not infallible, and that man very often errs in selecting and applying means.”
In that case, retort the critics, if praxeologists concede to making errors just like other mere mortals, it follows that they could therefore be mistaken about their original and basic axioms—and it would follow logically that all the deductions derived from those erroneous axioms would probably also be wrong. An argument logically derived from a mistaken premise could well be valid, but its truth is not guaranteed. The critics’ argument is that praxeologists cannot possibly be absolutely certain that men act. We cannot even be certain that men exist at all. As in the famous example, for all you know, you might not even be a man but just a butterfly dreaming that you are a man. What conclusive proof do you have that you are not actually a butterfly dreaming that you’re reading this article?
A story tells that Zhuang Zhou once dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy, and doing as he pleased. As a butterfly, he did not know he was Zhuang Zhou. All of a sudden, he awoke and found he was Zhuang Zhou, solid and unmistakably human. But then he did not know whether he was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.
If you cannot even prove that you are not a butterfly dreaming that you’re trying to prove yourself to be human, you certainly cannot prove that “individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals.” This inability to be certain about reality is what gender ideologues advert to when they say doctors cannot know for sure what sex people are at birth so they just guess. All doctors can do is make their best guess as to what sex the baby probably is, but that can change over time because sex is a “spectrum.” After all, any child might wake up tomorrow and “feel” like a different gender, or so their teachers would have them believe. As explained by a doctor from St. Louis, Missouri, advising teachers to “affirm” a class of fifth-grade girls who all decided they were actually boys, “The best we can do is affirm, validate and allow for exploration.”
In addition to truth being unknowable, a related criticism of praxeology is that it is unwise to derive universal principles through human reason because human beings are not always reasonable. In making choices, human beings are prone to irrationality, and our decisions are often influenced by our emotions or personal idiosyncrasies. Perceptions of reality are often mistaken; therefore, nobody can know for sure, beyond any doubt, what is real.
Rothbard acknowledges that we are all prone to error, we often wrongly perceive reality, and we do not always choose to follow the dictates of reason. Nevertheless, he argues that we must acknowledge that it is only through reason and rationality that we are able to live: “It is not, of course, that Mises believes that men will always listen to reason, or follow its dictates; it is simply that, insofar as men act at all, they are capable of following reason, and that pursuing such a course is literally the last best hope for mankind.” Rothbard’s point is that it is only through reason that we can forge a path through life:
Man is born with no innate knowledge of what ends to choose or how to use which means to attain them. Having no inborn knowledge of how to survive and prosper, he must learn what ends and means to adopt, and he is liable to make errors along the way. But only his reasoning mind can show him his goals and how to attain them.
Ultimately, the reason why Zhuang Zhou must accept the evidence of his own eyes and take it to be absolutely true that he is a man and not a butterfly is that it is not possible for a sane person persistently to evade reality. As Rothbard observes in “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics”:
Of course, a person may say that he denies the existence of self-evident principles or other established truths of the real world, but this mere saying has no epistemological validity. As Toohey pointed out, “A man may say anything he pleases, but he cannot think or do anything he pleases. He may say he saw a round square, but he cannot think he saw a round square. He may say, if he likes, that he saw a horse riding astride its own back, but we shall know what to think of him if he says it.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/07/no_a...an-action/
This Civilization Is Deeply Unnatural
There is nothing natural about this. The way things are. The way we are living. If this was the natural and healthy way for human society to exist, it wouldn’t require mountains of propaganda spin to keep it going.
By Caitlin Johnstone
July 6, 2024
There is nothing natural about this. The way things are. The way we are living. If this was the natural and healthy way for human society to exist, it wouldn’t require mountains of propaganda spin to keep it going.
Without copious amounts of mental narratives being fed to us by people in power, it would never occur to anyone that it’s a good or normal idea to commit to wars of aggression on the other side of the planet, or to back genocides, or to militarize globally with hundreds of military outposts around the world, or to foster systems which allow a few people to have far too much while others have far too little, or to destroy the biosphere we depend on for survival for the sake of shareholder profits. It would never occur to us to accept these things if we weren’t living our lives saturated in a nonstop barrage of narratives explaining that we should accept them.
We live like this throughout our entire lives. Through mass-scale psychological manipulation our minds are twisted into freakish and unnatural shapes to ensure that we will think, speak, act, work, spend and vote in ways we would never otherwise would, all to keep the wheels of this freakish and unnatural dystopia turning. If the powerful did not control the dominant narratives of this civilization, we would be living in a very different world than the one we live in today.
Narrative is how humans tend to get themselves into trouble. The believed thought stories in our minds are what drive us to hate, abuse, harm and kill our fellow humans. They’re what drive us into a state of anxiety even in moments when our bodies are completely safe and all our material needs are being met. They’re what have convinced humans to march out and fight wars and commit atrocities throughout the ages. Most of human suffering ultimately arises from believed thought stories.
But believed thought stories are what shape this civilization. The only reason why power exists where it exists, why nations and their borders exist as they do, why money operates the way that it operates, why laws are written and obeyed, is because we’ve all agreed to believe a bunch of made-up narratives saying that these things are true. Tomorrow Americans could all agree that Taylor Swift is the Dictator Supreme of the United States and that copper pennies are the only form of money with any value, and if enough people believed those narratives, those narratives would become reality.
That’s the power of narrative, and that’s why powerful people pour so much energy into harnessing it. Through the power of narrative, we can be convinced to consent to things as absurd as weapons contractors using their wealth to lobby for wars and militarism, which gives them more wealth that they can then spend on more lobbying. Or working forty hours a week making our boss far more money than we get paid in a company that’s killing our ecosystem just so that we can give our paychecks to some landlord in order to live in a building on the dying planet we were born on, solely because the boss and the landlord happened to luck into owning the company and the building. Or world leaders brandishing armageddon weapons at one another.
This backwards, insane civilization only looks normal to us because it has been deliberately normalized throughout our lives via careful narrative control by the people who benefit from it. Narrative rules our lives.
Without any believed narrative in your head, there’s just peaceful being with what is, and the human animal body tending to its few human animal needs. Add in a bunch of believed narrative and then all of a sudden you’ve got a self, others, desires, agendas, enemies, social standing, goals, inadequacy, stress, a painful past and a frightening future.
It is possible for the human organism to live without believed narratives in the shift in perception commonly known as spiritual enlightenment, and it is possible for humans as a whole to drop the believed narratives that are being imposed on us by the powerful in the same way. And just as enlightenment brings with it the realization that the old way of perceiving was actually an unnatural way of operating, awakening from the dominant narratives of our day will allow us to move into a much more natural way of existing with each other and with our ecosystem on this planet.
You can call this a lofty and unattainable goal if you want, but to me I’m just talking about the one and only adaptation that has any chance of steering our species away from annihilation. Every species hits an adaptation-or-extinction juncture at some point in its existence, and we’re arriving at ours right now. We’ll either transcend our unhealthy relationship with narrative, or we’ll wipe ourselves out via nuclear war or environmental destruction.
Every sign I’m seeing right now suggests we have the ability to go either way.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/07/no_a...unnatural/
We prohibit sex workers but condone mutilation of children for sex changes
One of our greatest failures in modern society is obviously the massive increase in encouraging young people to question their sexuality and even go to the extreme of sex change operations and hormone treatments to change the natural sexual nature of the person.
Another parallel flaw seems to me to be at the other extreme, which is prohibiting or frowning upon sex workers.
What if we find the middle ground? What about “hug” workers? I’m dead serious.
What about “I love you” support groups for people who are just plain not lucky enough to be born and raised in a way that’s conducive to having sexual partners of the opposite sex attracted to them?
Sexual success. Ever been a long time without food or water or air or sleep? Your body craves those things and forces you to have them or makes you experience so much pain you can hardly bear it.
The same goes for success in sexual pairing. Succeed and it feels amazing. Fail and it’s extremely painful.
This isn’t a “thought” or a mental gymnastic. It’s as built into our very being as food, water, and sleep.
We can do so much better at empathizing with the very many among us who aren’t so lucky in love.
Ooh. I just inadvertently substituted the word “sex” with the word “love.” What the hell just happened?
It’s obvious. In our culture we very often regard the meanings of sex and of love as being the same thing.
Sure, we can quibble about “if it’s just sex it isn’t love” and “there are many forms of love that have nothing to do with sex” but we all know that a “love song” is about “sex” and “being in love” is about sex. And in those contexts there’s nothing in the world negative about “sex” (as long as we don’t use that word too much; we freely talk about changing sex and mutilating sex parts but not about sharing sex).
Romance. Intimacy. Togetherness. Partners. All of those say the same thing but may be less in your face.
Why do we not help young people in a more mature way? Offer support groups and training for how to be more successful with the opposite sex. Help with match-making services for young people? And I mean “young” people who are just coming into puberty! Doesn’t have to lead to “sexual intercourse” yet but we can do soooo much to help with their drives, their social peer-group pressures, their forming their sense of self and identity.
Their feeling safe and “loved.” Maybe free or government-supported or community-supported “sensual massage” and “hugs” and “looking each other in the eye and saying I have these desires and fears the same as you” would do wonders for our young people. And why not facilitate healthy sex at legal age?
Compared to…
Encouraging young people to question and for heaven's sake change their gender in order to deal with the pain of not fitting in or being spurned by that one potential lover that means the universe to them?
At least if they change their sexual orientation and maybe even gender they won’t be alone. They will have plenty of others in the same category also desperately seeking love – uh, I mean sex and hugs, warmth and intimacy.
Are we nuts? What is wrong with us as a society?
Yes, I support people who really are attracted to the same sex, er, uh, same gender. I don’t know what the right terminology is by now. Nobody does!
But we know male and female is how nature created most of the animal kingdom, of which we’re a part. That’s why we have, uh, male and female. Just look around you at all of nature. All of life on the planet.
As if I have to make the case that heterosexuality is what nature gave us and is nature itself. Isn’t it obvious? To me, the male-female dynamic in all its forms and expressions is the most awe-inspiring aspect of life itself, of all of creation. It is how the cosmic engineers behind it all perpetuate creation!
Instead of hormonally messing with children’s bodies to change their sexuality, let’s get all the damn hormones and other sources of hormonal imbalance out of their food supply and environment.
Instead of encouraging sex or gender change let’s encourage and support hugs, caresses, and intimacy with the opposite sex in a healthy, open, thoughtful way with adults guiding things in a mature manner.
Instead of allowing people who make money on hormonal and surgical modifications of sexuality/gender in young people to influence and encourage young people to question their sexuality/gender, let’s put money into bringing in trained experts to help young people navigate their place in the flow of life.
Maybe even introduce “Heterosexual Honor Month.” Honoring the majority; honoring the miracle of life!
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I’m advocating for these changes and am working to help to bring about these kinds of changes.
I run a nonprofit called Champions for Humanity that hopes to facilitate these kinds of things while also contributing in various other ways to the well-being and healthy evolution of individuals, humanity, and the planet. For now, its primary work is charitably distributing a highly advanced ionic silver complex.
I also run a company called Evolved Influence, working to bring large donors into serving humanity in various ways.
And I run a company that makes by far the most advanced ionic silver complex in existence. Venture capitalists and investment bankers have said it can lead to a company worth over half a billion dollars.
I’ve turned down all of those potential investors. I think we’re facing the most existential challenge in human history. It’s whether we allow the pursuit of money, even for those who are already insanely rich, to be not just okay and condoned but the only factor deciding who has the most power and influence.
That’s the main problem of humankind. We only invented electricity a few days ago in the span of human history. Now we have computers, nukes, and AI and it’s all in the hands of the most obsessed with endless money with zero regard for life itself. It’s all about messing with things, not honoring life.
Life.
Think about that. What is life, actually?
It’s nature. It’s our body. It’s that magical desire, competitiveness, attraction, intimacy, vulnerability, and protectiveness, between male and female. It’s what makes a seed turn into a flowing plant and what created and is you!
We’ve gone off the deep end and need to learn to increasingly honor life over our messing with things.
Be in awe… of life!
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ABOUT ME AND MY WORK
I'm working to help bring about change for the better.
I advocate honoring life itself and being in awe of the marvel of life.
I teach and coach about ways to improve health from a holistic perspective, improve quality of life, facilitate personal growth, help society itself to grow, and perhaps all get along a little better.
I also run a company that makes a highly advanced ionic silver complex, marketed as Silver 100, which PhD chemistry professors have called "ingenious and unprecedented," "hundreds of times more efficient," and "light-years ahead." The track record is off the charts. You'll see it discussed in posts and ads on RMN. (Rayelan, owner of RMN, wrote a powerful endorsement encouraging readers to check out the product and even consider financial participation.)
While professional potential investors have predicted this ionic silver can lead to a half-billion-dollar company, I’ve refused to get involved with them. I’ll only work with people who care that we’re helping people more than they care about profits.
In addition, I'm working to change things on a larger scale. I believe our number one issue as a species is the still barbaric level of socioeconomic cultural development that’s allowing the most predatory and ruthless, and those with the most entrenched interests, to have the most influence and power. To me, that’s the core issue behind why all those other major issues persist. I’m working to genuinely accelerate the evolution of using wealth and investing in ways that consider the impact on humankind and the planet.
https://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/fo...ead=243273
By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
July 1, 2024
Human behavior is, to a large extent, socially constructed. People often act based on social norms, expectations, or habits rather than by attempting to ascertain the nature of reality itself. In that context, it is true to say that people’s perceptions of reality are socially constructed, as explained by the Thomas theorem:
Another way of looking at this concept is through W.I. Thomas’s notable Thomas theorem which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928). That is, people’s behavior can be determined by their subjective construction of reality rather than by objective reality.
In “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics,” Murray Rothbard defines praxeology as “the logical implications of the universal formal fact that people act, that they employ means to try to attain chosen ends.” People attempt to make decisions based on their best evaluation of the reality of the situation. If we have a good grasp of that reality, our decisions are likely to lead toward our goals; a weak grasp of reality is likely to yield disastrous decisions. Rothbard observes that “all that praxeology asserts is that the individual actor adopts goals and believes, whether erroneously or correctly, that he can arrive at them by the employment of certain means” (emphasis added). Our perception of reality may be erroneous or correct. When we fall into error, we do our best to review and correct our perception of reality in order to make better decisions in the future. This commonsense principle is reflected in the popular slogan FAFO: “FAFO is an acronym for ‘eff around and find out.’ It’s a cheeky way to tell people that if they play with fire, they might get burned—or to announce that they already have been.”
The commonsense view that our decisions are influenced by cultural and social norms is often overstated to convey the mistaken idea that there is no such thing as objective reality: reality itself is a social construct that depends on how you perceive or define it. This partly reflects a form of recklessness—abandoning the effort to investigate or distinguish true from false—sometimes because inquiry is deemed too costly and sometimes from a desire to avoid interpersonal or intergroup conflict by proclaiming that everyone is correct. It suits the egalitarian ethos of our time to declare that everyone has the right answer. I have “my truth,” and you have yours. In mathematics, teachers have been urged to be inclusive by teaching pupils that there are no right or wrong answers.
White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when the focus is on getting the “right” answer. . . . The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.
If everyone has different subjective perceptions of reality and it is not clear whose perceptions are correct and whose are erroneous, it often seems easiest to aver that nobody is right or wrong. If all “realities” are personally and socially constructed, then each person gets to choose his own reality, and everyone is a winner. Thus, we must accept that if anyone says he is a woman because he feels like a woman, then that is his reality. He really is a woman.
This idea that reality is a social construct prevails in public discourse and all fields of academic inquiry. Further, the fact that subjective perceptions of reality are influenced by factors such as a person’s intelligence, culture, and life experiences leads many to the mistaken conclusion that there is nothing self-evident in the world. Everything is up for debate, and the best we can do is to describe our personal “lived experiences.”
Hence comes the nostrum “do not believe your lying eyes”—after all, I may claim to see something different from what you see, and therefore, you should not believe anything exists just because you see it right there in front of you. Perceptions could be mistaken; therefore, nobody knows what is real. It would take decades of empirical peer-reviewed academic study to discover what is real.
For example, for all you know, you might not be a man but just a butterfly dreaming that you are a man. What proof do you have that you are not a butterfly? What credentials qualify you to distinguish between a man and a butterfly?
A story tells that Zhuang Zhou once dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy, and doing as he pleased. As a butterfly, he did not know he was Zhuang Zhou. All of a sudden, he awoke and found he was Zhuang Zhou, solid and unmistakably human. But then he did not know whether he was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.
Ultimately, Zhuang Zhou must accept the evidence of his own eyes as it is not possible for a sane person persistently to lie to himself. As Rothbard observes:
Of course, a person may say that he denies the existence of self-evident principles or other established truths of the real world, but this mere saying has no epistemological validity. As Toohey pointed out, “A man may say anything he pleases, but he cannot think or do anything he pleases. He may say he saw a round square, but he cannot think he saw a round square. He may say, if he likes, that he saw a horse riding astride its own back, but we shall know what to think of him if he says it.”
Those who are currently embarked upon empirical studies to prove the existence of the ninety-nine different sexes and genders have already mapped out the spectrum:
The sex designation of your brain and body may not be as black and white as scientists have believed it to be. Instead gender may fall somewhere on a gray scale. Scientists are trying to unravel the complex biological breakdowns of gender, and as they learn more, it’s becoming more apparent there aren’t just men and women among us.
A scientific analysis of what is a woman titled “White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study” informs us that “the white matter microstructure pattern in untreated FtM [female to male] transsexuals is closer to the pattern of subjects who share their gender identity (males) than those who share their biological sex (females). Our results provide evidence for an inherent difference in the brain structure of FtM transsexuals.”
This explains why Justice Ketanji Jackson, when asked “What is a woman?” replied that she is not a biologist and thus could not answer the question. If a justice of the Supreme Court publicly asserts that she does not know what a woman is, the implication is that this is a question best left to the credentialed experts.
The aim of “reality is a social construct” ideologues is to persuade ordinary people that they cannot know or understand reality without immersing themselves in top-level academic study that, conveniently, is currently under the tight control of socialists. For example, you cannot know or understand the meaning of justice until you have devoted years to studying the work of the expert on justice, John Rawls. When Rawls’s A Theory of Justice was published, Ayn Rand observed:
Let me say that I have not read and do not intend to read that book. . . . Is A Theory of Justice likely to be widely read? No. Is it likely to be influential? Yes—precisely for that reason. . . . if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the approval—all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions.
The same may be said of many great works that are treated as the unofficial mark of credibility for anyone who wants to comment on current affairs or political events. You must study John Maynard Keynes to discover whether there is inflation and, if so, whether inflation is good for you—do not just believe your lying wallet. You must study all eight volumes of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s General History of Africa before you can comment on whether socialism will work in Africa and study Karl Marx’s Das Kapital to form an opinion on whether communism will work in Africa if it is “done properly.”
While the complexity of science is self-evident, and acquiring a comprehensive understanding of any discipline requires many years of study, it does not follow that human beings cannot know or understand reality until a credentialed expert informs them of the “correct” view of the facts. Moreover, as David Gordon illustrates in his essay “Butler, Butt Out,” expert theorists who deny the existence of objective principles often lead their readers up the garden path:
It is often quite difficult to understand what she is saying. Here is a sample passage, by no means the most obscure in the book: “A phantasmatic sliding—what [Jacques] Lacan calls glissement—happens amid the kinds of arguments considered above. Are they even arguments? Or must we see the way that the syntax of the phantasm orders, and derails, the sequence of an argument?”
Faced with prose of this kind, the familiar words of Juvenal come to mind: Difficile est satiram non scribere.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/07/no_a...construct/
Varying Interpretations of Truth, or Truth as a Social Construct
By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
July 3, 2024
In this age of relativism, where one often hears reference to “your truth” and “my truth,” there are so many varying interpretations of truth that the concept of truth itself seems devoid of meaning. It is fashionable to see the concept of truth as indistinguishable from opinions or preferences. For example, Mari Fitzduff writes that
for many of us, far from our beliefs being “true,” they are actually born out of a particular social context, allied to physiological needs such as a differing neural sensitivity to threats and the greater certainty that a group can provide. Thus, beliefs are often what is termed “groupish” rather than necessarily true.
The task of deciding which group has the “true” version of facts is then left to expert fact-checkers who will pronounce on what is true or false.
In that light, it is easy to see why those who update dictionaries seek to reflect the common usage of words, rather than to reflect what is true. Dictionary definitions do not purport to be true nor do they claim to reflect any underlying universal truth underpinning the words defined; they are simply statements of how words are conventionally used. For example, the Cambridge Dictionary defines a woman as “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”—that is how the word “woman” is now commonly used, and being defined in that way by the dictionary does not mean that anyone who lives and identifies as female is, in truth, a woman.
Aristotle famously defined truth as facts corresponding with reality: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” In “Mises and the Diminished a Priori,” David Gordon defines an a priori proposition as
a proposition that can be known to be true just by thinking about it: you don’t need to examine the world to see whether it’s true. “2 + 2 = 4” is a priori true: once you understand what the proposition says, you can grasp that it’s true. You don’t need to keep counting objects to see whether the claimed equality holds true.
What does it mean to describe a proposition as true in that sense? In describing praxeological axioms as true, the word “truth” is deployed to mean that “if A implies B, and A is true, then B must also be true.” Science strives for accuracy and tests its propositions empirically or logically to ensure that they are accurate and valid and seeks to establish the correct facts. In ordinary language, we say it is true that 2 + 2 = 4, but “truth” in that context only means accuracy. It expresses a scientific principle that is true in the sense that equating 2 + 2 with 4 is the only formula that works. Anyone who accepts the suggestion of decolonized mathematics that 2 + 2 = 5, or indeed any number we want, would soon find their planes falling out of the sky and their infrastructure collapsing.
Beyond that, the question of what it would mean to say that science strives for “truth” is contested among philosophers. Indeed, many philosophers would say that there is no ultimate truth, in that what is said to be true is always open to question. In The Intellectuals and Socialism, Friedrich von Hayek explains why intellectuals are inclined to question everything:
Orthodoxy of any kind, any pretense that a system of ideas is final and must be unquestioningly accepted as a whole, is the one view which of necessity antagonizes all intellectuals, whatever their views on particular issues. Any system which judges men by the completeness of their conformity to a fixed set of opinions, by their “soundness” or the extent to which they can be relied upon to hold approved views on all points, deprives itself of a support without which no set of ideas can maintain its influence in modern society. The ability to criticize accepted views, to explore new vistas and to experience with new conceptions, provides the atmosphere without which the intellectual cannot breathe.
In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises also explains that neither the natural nor social sciences are concerned with truth in the philosophical sense: “Granted that science cannot give us truth—and who knows what truth really means—at any rate it is certain that it works in leading us to success.” Thus, praxeology, the science of human action, does not seek the truth in the grand “meaning of life” sense that characterizes many philosophical perspectives and perhaps all religions. In Mises’s view, praxeology does not “claim to reveal information about the true, objective, and absolute meaning of life.” Instead, praxeology “is neutral with regard to all judgments of value and the choice of ultimate ends. Its task is not to approve or to disapprove, but only to establish facts.”
Many liberals are also wary of the concept of “truth” and avoid it altogether not only because they are relativists who reject the notion of objective truth, but also because the concept of “truth” is associated in popular discourse with things people must do. Many people think that if something is true, then it follows logically that others must be forced to do it. For example, they would think that as soon as it is established to be true that something is harmful to health, it follows that it must be banned to force people to promote good health. Thus, the enemies of liberty often march under the banner of truth, armed with true principles about what is needed to promote human health. Liberty falls by the wayside. It is true that smoking is harmful to health, and on that basis, the Tory Party in the United Kingdom wants to ban it. As Rothbard warned:
And remember, if today they come for the smoker, tomorrow they will come for you. If today they grab your cigarette, tomorrow they will seize your junk food, your carbohydrates, your yummy but “empty” calories . . . Are you ready for the Left Nutritional Kingdom, with everyone forced to confine his food to yoghurt and tofu and bean sprouts? Are you ready to be confined in a cage, to make sure that your diet is perfect, and that you get the prescribed Compulsory Exercise?
Rothbard warns against this “neo-Puritanical” combining of the theological quest for truth with the statist quest for power: the power of the state to tell everyone what they must do.
In the postmodern age, far from being devoted to the pursuit of truth, statists promote the ideology that truth is anything you want and that each of us can therefore have our own version of the truth. They are devoted not to the pursuit of truth but to the version of “truth” that they think will promote their political goals. As Lew Rockwell observes: “In class after class, the postmodern message is the same: what we call truth is wholly subjective, what we call science is merely the momentary professional consensus, and what we call reality is a fiction made up to sooth our psychological need for order in the universe.”
Far from being designed to embrace the truth, postmodernism rejects the very notion that anything is true.
The Reality of Human Action
By Wanjiru Njoya
Mises.org
July 10, 2024
The concept of reality is questioned by the notion, as László Krasznahorkai expressed it, that there are “many realities, or none at all.” By contrast, in Human Action, Ludwig von Mises offers a clear concept of reality, which he describes as “the whole complex of all causal relations between events, which wishful thinking cannot alter.” Building on this idea, Murray Rothbard argues that the entire science of human action can be deduced from a few basic axioms that are true about the real world. Real in this context means, as Mises says, “in the eyes of man, all that he cannot alter and to whose existence he must adjust his action if he wants to attain his ends.”
Rothbard’s argument is that in the real world, some inescapable basic truths are self-evident, and from these basic axioms, we can derive further true principles based on the logic that “if A is true, and A implies B, then B is true.” For example, praxeologists assert that “individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals.” From this basic axiom, which praxeologists take to be absolutely and universally true, they deduce further principles about human action. Rothbard argues
(a) that the fundamental axioms and premises of economics are absolutely true;
(b) that the theorems and conclusions deduced by the laws of logic from these postulates are therefore absolutely true;
© that there is consequently no need for empirical “testing,” either of the premises or the conclusions; and
(d) that the deduced theorems could not be tested even if it were desirable.
Leaving aside debates about whether these axioms have any empirical content, some critics have countered that praxeologists cannot possibly know whether their fundamental axioms and premises are absolutely true in the first place, as stated in Rothbard’s proposition (a). After all, a good Popperian knows that no scientific principle can be stated as absolutely true because a scientist could come along tomorrow and show that it is not true after all. The lesson to be derived from the awkward business involving Galileo Galilei and the Roman Catholic Inquisition, so the critics assert, is that we should never assume anything to be absolutely true. This contestation is summarized by Rothbard as follows:
In physics, therefore, postulated explanations have to be hypothesized in such a way that they or their consequents can be empirically tested. Even then, the laws are only tentatively rather than absolutely valid.
. . . On the other hand, economics, or praxeology, has full and complete knowledge of its original and basic axioms. These are the axioms implicit in the very existence of human action, and they are absolutely valid so long as human beings exist.
Praxeologists are clear that they make no claim to be omniscient. In Human Action, Mises explains: “The honest and conscientious truth-seekers have never pretended that reason and scientific research can answer all questions. They were fully aware of the limitations imposed on the human mind.” Nor do they claim to be infallible, as Mises explains that “human reason is not infallible, and that man very often errs in selecting and applying means.”
In that case, retort the critics, if praxeologists concede to making errors just like other mere mortals, it follows that they could therefore be mistaken about their original and basic axioms—and it would follow logically that all the deductions derived from those erroneous axioms would probably also be wrong. An argument logically derived from a mistaken premise could well be valid, but its truth is not guaranteed. The critics’ argument is that praxeologists cannot possibly be absolutely certain that men act. We cannot even be certain that men exist at all. As in the famous example, for all you know, you might not even be a man but just a butterfly dreaming that you are a man. What conclusive proof do you have that you are not actually a butterfly dreaming that you’re reading this article?
A story tells that Zhuang Zhou once dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering around, happy, and doing as he pleased. As a butterfly, he did not know he was Zhuang Zhou. All of a sudden, he awoke and found he was Zhuang Zhou, solid and unmistakably human. But then he did not know whether he was Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.
If you cannot even prove that you are not a butterfly dreaming that you’re trying to prove yourself to be human, you certainly cannot prove that “individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals.” This inability to be certain about reality is what gender ideologues advert to when they say doctors cannot know for sure what sex people are at birth so they just guess. All doctors can do is make their best guess as to what sex the baby probably is, but that can change over time because sex is a “spectrum.” After all, any child might wake up tomorrow and “feel” like a different gender, or so their teachers would have them believe. As explained by a doctor from St. Louis, Missouri, advising teachers to “affirm” a class of fifth-grade girls who all decided they were actually boys, “The best we can do is affirm, validate and allow for exploration.”
In addition to truth being unknowable, a related criticism of praxeology is that it is unwise to derive universal principles through human reason because human beings are not always reasonable. In making choices, human beings are prone to irrationality, and our decisions are often influenced by our emotions or personal idiosyncrasies. Perceptions of reality are often mistaken; therefore, nobody can know for sure, beyond any doubt, what is real.
Rothbard acknowledges that we are all prone to error, we often wrongly perceive reality, and we do not always choose to follow the dictates of reason. Nevertheless, he argues that we must acknowledge that it is only through reason and rationality that we are able to live: “It is not, of course, that Mises believes that men will always listen to reason, or follow its dictates; it is simply that, insofar as men act at all, they are capable of following reason, and that pursuing such a course is literally the last best hope for mankind.” Rothbard’s point is that it is only through reason that we can forge a path through life:
Man is born with no innate knowledge of what ends to choose or how to use which means to attain them. Having no inborn knowledge of how to survive and prosper, he must learn what ends and means to adopt, and he is liable to make errors along the way. But only his reasoning mind can show him his goals and how to attain them.
Ultimately, the reason why Zhuang Zhou must accept the evidence of his own eyes and take it to be absolutely true that he is a man and not a butterfly is that it is not possible for a sane person persistently to evade reality. As Rothbard observes in “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics”:
Of course, a person may say that he denies the existence of self-evident principles or other established truths of the real world, but this mere saying has no epistemological validity. As Toohey pointed out, “A man may say anything he pleases, but he cannot think or do anything he pleases. He may say he saw a round square, but he cannot think he saw a round square. He may say, if he likes, that he saw a horse riding astride its own back, but we shall know what to think of him if he says it.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/07/no_a...an-action/
This Civilization Is Deeply Unnatural
There is nothing natural about this. The way things are. The way we are living. If this was the natural and healthy way for human society to exist, it wouldn’t require mountains of propaganda spin to keep it going.
By Caitlin Johnstone
July 6, 2024
There is nothing natural about this. The way things are. The way we are living. If this was the natural and healthy way for human society to exist, it wouldn’t require mountains of propaganda spin to keep it going.
Without copious amounts of mental narratives being fed to us by people in power, it would never occur to anyone that it’s a good or normal idea to commit to wars of aggression on the other side of the planet, or to back genocides, or to militarize globally with hundreds of military outposts around the world, or to foster systems which allow a few people to have far too much while others have far too little, or to destroy the biosphere we depend on for survival for the sake of shareholder profits. It would never occur to us to accept these things if we weren’t living our lives saturated in a nonstop barrage of narratives explaining that we should accept them.
We live like this throughout our entire lives. Through mass-scale psychological manipulation our minds are twisted into freakish and unnatural shapes to ensure that we will think, speak, act, work, spend and vote in ways we would never otherwise would, all to keep the wheels of this freakish and unnatural dystopia turning. If the powerful did not control the dominant narratives of this civilization, we would be living in a very different world than the one we live in today.
Narrative is how humans tend to get themselves into trouble. The believed thought stories in our minds are what drive us to hate, abuse, harm and kill our fellow humans. They’re what drive us into a state of anxiety even in moments when our bodies are completely safe and all our material needs are being met. They’re what have convinced humans to march out and fight wars and commit atrocities throughout the ages. Most of human suffering ultimately arises from believed thought stories.
But believed thought stories are what shape this civilization. The only reason why power exists where it exists, why nations and their borders exist as they do, why money operates the way that it operates, why laws are written and obeyed, is because we’ve all agreed to believe a bunch of made-up narratives saying that these things are true. Tomorrow Americans could all agree that Taylor Swift is the Dictator Supreme of the United States and that copper pennies are the only form of money with any value, and if enough people believed those narratives, those narratives would become reality.
That’s the power of narrative, and that’s why powerful people pour so much energy into harnessing it. Through the power of narrative, we can be convinced to consent to things as absurd as weapons contractors using their wealth to lobby for wars and militarism, which gives them more wealth that they can then spend on more lobbying. Or working forty hours a week making our boss far more money than we get paid in a company that’s killing our ecosystem just so that we can give our paychecks to some landlord in order to live in a building on the dying planet we were born on, solely because the boss and the landlord happened to luck into owning the company and the building. Or world leaders brandishing armageddon weapons at one another.
This backwards, insane civilization only looks normal to us because it has been deliberately normalized throughout our lives via careful narrative control by the people who benefit from it. Narrative rules our lives.
Without any believed narrative in your head, there’s just peaceful being with what is, and the human animal body tending to its few human animal needs. Add in a bunch of believed narrative and then all of a sudden you’ve got a self, others, desires, agendas, enemies, social standing, goals, inadequacy, stress, a painful past and a frightening future.
It is possible for the human organism to live without believed narratives in the shift in perception commonly known as spiritual enlightenment, and it is possible for humans as a whole to drop the believed narratives that are being imposed on us by the powerful in the same way. And just as enlightenment brings with it the realization that the old way of perceiving was actually an unnatural way of operating, awakening from the dominant narratives of our day will allow us to move into a much more natural way of existing with each other and with our ecosystem on this planet.
You can call this a lofty and unattainable goal if you want, but to me I’m just talking about the one and only adaptation that has any chance of steering our species away from annihilation. Every species hits an adaptation-or-extinction juncture at some point in its existence, and we’re arriving at ours right now. We’ll either transcend our unhealthy relationship with narrative, or we’ll wipe ourselves out via nuclear war or environmental destruction.
Every sign I’m seeing right now suggests we have the ability to go either way.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/07/no_a...unnatural/
We prohibit sex workers but condone mutilation of children for sex changes
One of our greatest failures in modern society is obviously the massive increase in encouraging young people to question their sexuality and even go to the extreme of sex change operations and hormone treatments to change the natural sexual nature of the person.
Another parallel flaw seems to me to be at the other extreme, which is prohibiting or frowning upon sex workers.
What if we find the middle ground? What about “hug” workers? I’m dead serious.
What about “I love you” support groups for people who are just plain not lucky enough to be born and raised in a way that’s conducive to having sexual partners of the opposite sex attracted to them?
Sexual success. Ever been a long time without food or water or air or sleep? Your body craves those things and forces you to have them or makes you experience so much pain you can hardly bear it.
The same goes for success in sexual pairing. Succeed and it feels amazing. Fail and it’s extremely painful.
This isn’t a “thought” or a mental gymnastic. It’s as built into our very being as food, water, and sleep.
We can do so much better at empathizing with the very many among us who aren’t so lucky in love.
Ooh. I just inadvertently substituted the word “sex” with the word “love.” What the hell just happened?
It’s obvious. In our culture we very often regard the meanings of sex and of love as being the same thing.
Sure, we can quibble about “if it’s just sex it isn’t love” and “there are many forms of love that have nothing to do with sex” but we all know that a “love song” is about “sex” and “being in love” is about sex. And in those contexts there’s nothing in the world negative about “sex” (as long as we don’t use that word too much; we freely talk about changing sex and mutilating sex parts but not about sharing sex).
Romance. Intimacy. Togetherness. Partners. All of those say the same thing but may be less in your face.
Why do we not help young people in a more mature way? Offer support groups and training for how to be more successful with the opposite sex. Help with match-making services for young people? And I mean “young” people who are just coming into puberty! Doesn’t have to lead to “sexual intercourse” yet but we can do soooo much to help with their drives, their social peer-group pressures, their forming their sense of self and identity.
Their feeling safe and “loved.” Maybe free or government-supported or community-supported “sensual massage” and “hugs” and “looking each other in the eye and saying I have these desires and fears the same as you” would do wonders for our young people. And why not facilitate healthy sex at legal age?
Compared to…
Encouraging young people to question and for heaven's sake change their gender in order to deal with the pain of not fitting in or being spurned by that one potential lover that means the universe to them?
At least if they change their sexual orientation and maybe even gender they won’t be alone. They will have plenty of others in the same category also desperately seeking love – uh, I mean sex and hugs, warmth and intimacy.
Are we nuts? What is wrong with us as a society?
Yes, I support people who really are attracted to the same sex, er, uh, same gender. I don’t know what the right terminology is by now. Nobody does!
But we know male and female is how nature created most of the animal kingdom, of which we’re a part. That’s why we have, uh, male and female. Just look around you at all of nature. All of life on the planet.
As if I have to make the case that heterosexuality is what nature gave us and is nature itself. Isn’t it obvious? To me, the male-female dynamic in all its forms and expressions is the most awe-inspiring aspect of life itself, of all of creation. It is how the cosmic engineers behind it all perpetuate creation!
Instead of hormonally messing with children’s bodies to change their sexuality, let’s get all the damn hormones and other sources of hormonal imbalance out of their food supply and environment.
Instead of encouraging sex or gender change let’s encourage and support hugs, caresses, and intimacy with the opposite sex in a healthy, open, thoughtful way with adults guiding things in a mature manner.
Instead of allowing people who make money on hormonal and surgical modifications of sexuality/gender in young people to influence and encourage young people to question their sexuality/gender, let’s put money into bringing in trained experts to help young people navigate their place in the flow of life.
Maybe even introduce “Heterosexual Honor Month.” Honoring the majority; honoring the miracle of life!
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I’m advocating for these changes and am working to help to bring about these kinds of changes.
I run a nonprofit called Champions for Humanity that hopes to facilitate these kinds of things while also contributing in various other ways to the well-being and healthy evolution of individuals, humanity, and the planet. For now, its primary work is charitably distributing a highly advanced ionic silver complex.
I also run a company called Evolved Influence, working to bring large donors into serving humanity in various ways.
And I run a company that makes by far the most advanced ionic silver complex in existence. Venture capitalists and investment bankers have said it can lead to a company worth over half a billion dollars.
I’ve turned down all of those potential investors. I think we’re facing the most existential challenge in human history. It’s whether we allow the pursuit of money, even for those who are already insanely rich, to be not just okay and condoned but the only factor deciding who has the most power and influence.
That’s the main problem of humankind. We only invented electricity a few days ago in the span of human history. Now we have computers, nukes, and AI and it’s all in the hands of the most obsessed with endless money with zero regard for life itself. It’s all about messing with things, not honoring life.
Life.
Think about that. What is life, actually?
It’s nature. It’s our body. It’s that magical desire, competitiveness, attraction, intimacy, vulnerability, and protectiveness, between male and female. It’s what makes a seed turn into a flowing plant and what created and is you!
We’ve gone off the deep end and need to learn to increasingly honor life over our messing with things.
Be in awe… of life!
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ABOUT ME AND MY WORK
I'm working to help bring about change for the better.
I advocate honoring life itself and being in awe of the marvel of life.
I teach and coach about ways to improve health from a holistic perspective, improve quality of life, facilitate personal growth, help society itself to grow, and perhaps all get along a little better.
I also run a company that makes a highly advanced ionic silver complex, marketed as Silver 100, which PhD chemistry professors have called "ingenious and unprecedented," "hundreds of times more efficient," and "light-years ahead." The track record is off the charts. You'll see it discussed in posts and ads on RMN. (Rayelan, owner of RMN, wrote a powerful endorsement encouraging readers to check out the product and even consider financial participation.)
While professional potential investors have predicted this ionic silver can lead to a half-billion-dollar company, I’ve refused to get involved with them. I’ll only work with people who care that we’re helping people more than they care about profits.
In addition, I'm working to change things on a larger scale. I believe our number one issue as a species is the still barbaric level of socioeconomic cultural development that’s allowing the most predatory and ruthless, and those with the most entrenched interests, to have the most influence and power. To me, that’s the core issue behind why all those other major issues persist. I’m working to genuinely accelerate the evolution of using wealth and investing in ways that consider the impact on humankind and the planet.
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