By Steven Yates
July 13, 2024
“[Man] is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every “is” implies an “ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.” -Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” presented at a symposium on Ethics In Our Time, University of Wisconsin, February 9, 1961.
If I told you that through the “right” process of meditation, will power, and concentration (close your eyes!), that you could suspend gravity — and then walk off, say, your tenth-floor balcony and continue to walk across mid-air — you’d probably look at me like I’d gone nuts. And rightly so.
Because unless you’re God, you’re not going to “suspend gravity.”
And if you try to do something so spectacularly Darwin-Awards-level dumb, odds are good, you’ll be killed when you hit the ground.
We’re free to choose, as Miss Rand said above in one of her most lucid moments, but we’re not free to avoid the consequences of bad choices.
Choose rationally, basing your choices on facts to the best you can ascertain them, and you’ll at least survive. Maybe even thrive. Choose irrationally, basing your choices on fantasy, propaganda or lies, you’ll pay a possibly very steep price.
For us mortals, the laws of nature seem to be fixed. We’ve developed civilization around this premise: engines, vehicles, bridges, skyscrapers, etc.
Yet there are a growing number of areas in (post)modern civilization where fantasy has outrun fact, with help from political and (to my continued dismay) “educational” institutions. It continues, because the protected elites involved can ensure that others pay for their mistakes!
Transgenderism Versus Reality
Among the laws of nature that science (not to be confused with The Science) has uncovered: broadly, chromosomes determine sex. If you were born with XX chromosomes, you’re female. If you were born with XY chromosomes, you’re male. These are biologically fixed. It is true that there are anomalies — hermaphrodites — but these are rare, and also biologically fixed.
In other words, if you’re born female you can’t “choose” to turn yourself into a man; and if you’re a man, you can’t “choose” to become a woman.
This was common horse sense science for years. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or just lying.
Transgenderism is an ideology that says otherwise, denying science in favor of (I assume) some version of The Science, in which hormone suppression and other forms of “gender affirming care” transcend biology.
At one level, we see the consequences of the transgenderism lie: the Ionesco-level absurdism of a man (“Rachel” Levine) holding a top position in the Bidenista administration wearing a dress. Then evading perfectly rational questions about promoting this absurdity to children. Watch. Every time Levine opens his mouth and speaks with that deep voice, it’s clear to any rational, reality-based person that Levine is a man.
Yet following that interrogation, Sen. Paul (R-Ky) was condemned as “transphobic.”
We’re seeing the ruination of women’s sports, as biological men are allowed to compete with women because our present, post-truth political climate allows them to self-identify as women. Listen.
These people’s reality-denial makes them violent when confronted over it, as swimmer Riley Gaines discovered.
The lie still stands. We may see the ruination of children’s lives, as government schools promote this ideology, confusing them, encouraging them to question their “gender,” based on the postmoderny view that gender is a “social construct,” and that biology is “fluid.”
Militant feminists in academia have been promoting these weird ideas since the late 1980s.
In the 2010s, when universities really started going to crap, and when social media sites like Tumblr became a safe haven for transgenderism, this ideology got legs. It has been running (and swimming) ever since. Those who have tried to challenge it have found the consequences to be career-ending, just as those of us who challenged the utility and honesty of affirmative action back in the 1990s found that to be severely career-damaging.
Sometimes there are immediate consequences to believing, and promoting, something that is factually false. Thinking you can suspend gravity by force of will is an obvious example.
Other times, the consequences of lies, whether told to yourself, others, or an entire society, only emerge over a period of time that varies from case to case.
If you smoke one cigarette, you might have a coughing fit, but you’ll probably not get lung cancer or heart disease. If you chain smoke for 40 to 50 years, telling yourself that can’t happen to me, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll do permanent, life-ending damage.
Oddly, Rand herself never grasped this. She was so addicted to smoking that she couldn’t quit even when her doctor told her cigarettes were killing her. Hospitalized, she would sneak off to places where she could have a cigarette! She died in 1984 — from lung cancer.
Her “Objectivist” philosophy had no room for addictions, because it saw our rational “free will” as absolute.
This is a consequence of thinking that a philosophical ideology trumps (or is) fact. It may not see forms of causality in which consequences are systemic and only occur over a long period of time.
Does this apply to our present political-economic mess? Let’s find out!
The Strange Case of Senile Joe
For four years now, Democrats have been in collective denial about Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Or his hard-left handlers (Obama? The Clintons? George Soros?) believed they could cover for him while they worked to reverse the Trump years and get the globalist-leftist agenda back on track.
We saw the truth on national television June 27.
As I put it last week, now they’re in peeing-in-their-pants panic about whether they can retain the White House.
Biden’s handlers can’t cover for him anymore. There’s simply too much evidence floating around, and no longer can it be dismissed as the product of “right-wingers.”
Biden himself, at least as of this writing, has dug in his heels.
This is typical of dementia sufferers. They go into denial, even when the evidence is plain to everyone around them.
As our family doctor put it metaphorically, when explaining that I had to get help for my father (this was summer of 2008) who fiercely denied that he needed help, it isn’t the patient talking but the condition.
Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia patients can’t be reasoned with. They can only be placated. It’s worse in late afternoons and early evenings. The sufferer becomes increasingly and often inexplicably agitated.
This is called sundowning.
Biden’s family — especially his academic feminist wife — stands behind him. Again, at least as of this writing.
It’s become clear, though: Biden won’t survive another four years in office.
Thus the frenzy in the Democrat Party over who replaces him. The obvious choice, for some, would seem to be his VP, Kamala Harris.
The fact that other names are being seriously floated (I listed them last week) is an index of how seriously she’s taken, even by her fellow Democrats. She’s a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion pick. This is obvious to everyone with a brain.
There’s no explicit legal process, though — Democrats themselves changed the rules allowing them top-down replacement of a candidate back in 2018 — and it portends a possible free-for-all when the Democrat Party Convention is held in August. Unless, that is, Biden steps aside voluntarily or is removed from office via the 25th Amendment. The latter would be fought in court and cost valuable time unless the Supreme Court again steps in on an emergency basis and decides the matter.
A Parade of Lies and Consequences
This is what happens when an entire four-year administrative edifice is built on lies. One risks a meltdown far worse than if the truth were simply faced.
The lies about Joe Biden’s cognitive state are only the start. I’ve been convinced from the get-go that (as James Howard Kunstler puts it) there was something “janky” about Election 2020. Even if we can’t prove overt fraud anymore (I can’t help but wonder what happened to all those affidavits, signed under penalty of perjury), social media giants like Facebook have admitted that they suppressed information about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the evidence on it that would have revealed the extent of Biden family corruption. And yet leftist Democrats and corporate media keep talking, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, about the Big Lie (that the election was stolen).
We were lied to about what happened in Charlottesville in August of 2017. To this day, no corporate media leviathan or governmental entity has mentioned the Black Lives Matter and Antifa presence that day, much less that they (not Unite the Right) initiated the violence. (For more specifics, go here.)
These are just the lies that come to mind first. I studied them. Lies go back decades.
We were told when the stock market boomed in the 1990s that we were seeing genuine economic health and not the most massive credit expansion in human history. We received a minor-league wake-up call in 2000; banking leviathans ignored it and kept on with reckless financial behavior. Then the meltdown of 2008 happened.
If and when the bottom drops out again in a fashion that makes what happened in 2008 look like a bad hair day by comparison, we’ll learn the consequences of the mixture of lying from our so-called leaders and lying to ourselves trying to rationalize their motives.
We’ve been lied to about the Federal Reserve and about the long-term sustainability of the mountains of debt that just keep piling up: the national debt, consumer credit card debt, student-loan debt, and so on. When historians write about Richard Nixon, we read much about Watergate but little about his killing the gold standard. Ronald Reagan, ten years later, observed that no nation that goes off the gold standard remains great. Don Regan, one of the power-elite moles in his administration, told him to shut up about such things. He did.
We were lied to about Iraq, told about WMDs that did not exist. The Iraq War, which actually began during the first Bush regime with the Gulf War, ultimately destabilized the entire region.
All to control resources, protect Israel, and help Halliburton score big with what leftist author Naomi Klein called “disaster capitalism.”
Again: lies have consequences. A reason power elites like wars is because, as the saying goes, the first casualty of war is always the truth.
We’ve been lied to about what led Russia to invade Ukraine, as the “Maiden” revolution of 2014 (which overturned a democratically-elected government) was memory-holed and evidence of the abusive treatment of ethnic Russians by the government in Kyiv was blacked out. Western media also lie about Russia “invading” Crimea. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to leave corrupt Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.
We were lied to about the origins of the coronavirus. Not a scrap of evidence ever supported the claim that it “evolved in a bat.” The “lab leak hypothesis” was blasted in both government corporate media as a “racist conspiracy theory.” Another lie.
We were lied to about the necessity of lockdowns which destroyed thousands of small businesses while corporate leviathans reaped windfalls. We were lied to when told there was no Big Tech censorship of reputable scientists claiming that the lockdowns were harmful. Recall the Twitter Files. An entire cohort of children is behind where they should be educationally because of something that was never necessary.
We were lied to about the “safety and efficacy” of the covid-19 shots; the evidence is in of a large spike in abnormal deaths from heart attacks, “turbo-cancers,” and similar causes in people under the age of 50 is in the numbers aggregated by life insurance companies having to make payouts, and from funeral homes and government databases.
Do I even need to talk about George Floyd, or the “mostly peaceful protesters” who did hundreds of millions of dollars of damage in around a dozen cities during the 2020 “summer of love”?
Or about the “insurrection” of January 6, 2021?
I’m not sure we’ve been told the full truth about what happened Oct. 7, 2023. We’re safe in presuming that an explosion of violence did occur, as we have abundant on-the-ground testimony; but such explosions of pure, insane rage don’t come from thin air. What has Israel been doing to the Palestinians for 80 years now, and why aren’t we supposed to ask? Why are most Evangelical Christians in America locked into the support-Israel-no-matter-what mindset with all four claws, despite horrifying evidence brutal exterminations of Palestinians and famine conditions in Gaza? I doubt very many starving women and children there care about Hamas! Making matters worse: the Israeli army designated certain locations “safe zones,” and when Gazans go there, the Israelis attack those places!
God’s Chosen People, or garden variety psychopaths no different from what they once opposed?
Again: why aren’t we Americans supposed to question the unconditional support for Israel coming from across the political spectrum, and as prevalent amongst neocons (who tend to be operational atheists) as it is among Christians? Is AIPAC really that powerful? Are we all supposed to be Zionists now? Zionism, if you recall, is an ideology, separate from Judaism.
Conclusion
Lies, lies, and more lies. All with consequences, sometimes devastating ones.
One of these is that few people really, honestly know what to believe any more. Trust in American institutions — media, academic, corporate, Congressional — is at historic lows.
But the really painful consequences come not from the lies themselves but waking up one day and realizing that you’ve been butting your head up against reality pretending it is something other than what it is: something you either acknowledge, or sooner or later it automatically works against you.
We’re back to our lead Ayn Rand quote. I’m not a “disciple” of hers. I think she greatly overestimated the human capacity for rational thought. Even she lied to herself, as we saw.
Many “right-wing” freedom believers kid themselves about government being their sole enemy, deluding themselves that there is no meaningful systemic coercion by corporations, or what Peter Joseph (the Zeitgeist man) calls structural violence perpetuated by them (addictive ingredients in processed foods being an example of this).
I have no explanation for the love affair many conservatives, most Libertarians (and their close cousins who label themselves voluntarists) have with corporations. Corporations don’t love them. Big Tech and Big Pharma scorn them, all the way to the bank.
To my mind, these delusions aren’t all that different from leftists deceiving themselves and lying to the country about diversity being a strength, and about the idea that men can become women and women can become men through the magical incantations of “gender affirming care.”
The only way to break out of the universe of lies is, first, to be skeptical of all “official” sources (government, mass media, corporate, academic) as well as many “unofficial” ones, then to do one’s diligent best to learn the truth in those areas of one’s life one cares about. Read multiple sources. Experiment and discover what works. Don’t make the assumption you have the final answer, or are incapable of being deceived.
There are things we can rely on, statements we can and should believe, because they deliver positive results. Sometimes, though, immediate results aren’t available. Present your best findings for evaluation — to oneself, and to anyone you trust who cares to listen.
Oftentimes, weaponized language is a dead giveaway that you are being lied to, or at least that an official narrative is being protected. Be alert to these: misinformation, conspiracy theory, racist, white supremacist, fascist or neofascist, domestic terrorist, Putin-lover, homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic, etc., etc., etc.
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored more than 20 articles, book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.
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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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