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2021-03-23

The wars of ideas and propaganda about Covid, the "fight against racism", the attempts to divide societies through race, politics, gender, religion, "green", vaxxers vs anti-vaxxers, nuclear disarmament (sorry scrub that, it was overtaken long ago and now it just shows my age) - these are all matters of essentially a spiritual nature - they have become battle-grounds of faith and dogma rather than truth and logic.

So in a world comprised of billions of people of hundreds of nations, the question of how to order our campaigns toward success or failure has become urgent in our age of political crisis.

The "supreme ruler" chooses to rule by (a) force (b) fear of force (c) propaganda that seeks to give his rule a veneer of false truth and logic.

The controlled democracies are ruled by elites who actually behave as much like supreme rulers as they can, but they seek to persuade their citizens that they can vote their representatives into a parliament/congress/peoples assembly where they can enact laws on the people's behalf - in reality they control the political parties so that a candidate must (a) join the party in order to enjoy any prospect of election and (b) vote according to his party whips. Those who control the Party (and preferably the civil service) control the nation.

Real democracies (can anybody think of examples of such?) would work differently, but operating models are thin on the ground.

Somebody once said "I think, therefore I am" - which is a good bit of logic, but rather begs the all-important question of what "I think" actually means.

Many people behave as though correct thinking means that "your thinking agrees with mine". But we are all human and to be human means to err, so that is bad thinking unless you are superhuman and do not err. "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone".

So on what should we base our thinking?

Clearly we should examine all aspects of the truth, think through all the implications and options, apply faultless logic and reach our own conclusions - but, we simply do not have the capacity to access to all the facts, or the training to understand the implications, or the opportunity to undertake all the necessary studies, to do this for ourselves for every issue that confronts us.

So we only do this for those issues in which we decide to invest in the necessary studies that enable us to attempt this - for the remainder we must put our faith in the views of those more expert than ourselves.

So the choice of expert is critical - and this is where our government's attempts to control the Covid narrative (whatever your views on Covid) are foundering - so many people are simply no longer prepared to accept their choice of "experts", nor their drastic prescriptions for action, at face value.

Choice of expert is a matter of faith, but faith based upon "common sense" "rule of thumb thinking" or on the "fallacy of authority"?

"Put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them".

That passage brings to the fore another option, not immediately obvious if you are not of a religious persuasion, that we can put our trust in our God. Note that this must be our personal God, not the God of some prelate or other, because then we would have the same problem of which prelate to trust . . .

Now I'm not going to try to persuade anybody that you should have a personal God. Rather I will defer to an expert in the field, someone who claims a personal relationship with his God, and is able to articulate it with conviction.

Here he is in full-on preacher mode, recounting how the Lord has led him into his vocation as probably only he can - below that, please find him in a much more personal and homely mode - if you find his stage performance a bit full-on, his "Give him 15" soliloquies are much more comfortable:

 

NB: Ignore the "TRUMP PROPHECY" bit - I consider that Fake News - Trump is not mentioned in this presentation.

 

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