The Noble Lie

“In Le Figaro magazine of 6 January 2007, Alain-Gerard Slama wrote that ‘the two cardinal values on which democracy rests are liberty and growth.’ This is a perfect defintion of liberalism. One in which, of course, what the author takes care to call ‘democracy’ is simply the liberal system, bending the word to the requirements defined in modern ’semantic workshops’. (This is the name in the United States for bodies charged with imposing on the public at large, by way of the control of the media, the use of words that best meets the needs of the ruling classes.) This now customary slight of hand naturally authorizes a whole series of very useful discrepancies. If the word ‘democracy’, for example, must now be used only to define liberalism, then a new term is needed to denote that ‘goverment of the People, by the People, for the People’ which was seen as the very essence of democracy not so long ago. The new term chosen by the semantic workshops is ‘populism’. All that is needed, then, is to equate populism (in the face of any basic historical knowledge) with a perverse variant of classic fascism, and the effects desired can be obtained with a disconcerting facility. If it occurs to you, for example, that people should be consulted on this or that problem that affects their future, or that the incomes of the business world’s great predators are really indecent, something within you immediately warns that you’re in danger of falling into the most disturbed ‘populism’, and consequently that the ‘filthy Beast’ is approaching you in great strides. As a well-brought-up citizen (well brought up by the media industry), you immediately know what you should really think and do.”

Jean-Claude Michea, “Realm of Lessser Evil”

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1813

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
- Ernest Hemingway

Here’s a great collection of quotes on conformity.

Before you can break out of prison, you must first realize you’re locked up.

Author Unknown

It’s so easy to make something so evil and heartless, sound so brave and noble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man

“The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the stage of radical reconstruction and become in his own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training… Man will make it his goal…to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will”

- Leon Trotsky

“Communism is socialism in a hurry.”
- Lenin

I have so much going on in my life at the moment that I don’t get to devote near the time that I want to watching documentaries, reading, listening to scholars and heretics, and writing about the things which whirl through my mind. I might not be posting terribly much in the near future, but I am not giving up on the site.

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
- Jay Gould, robber baron, in real life

“You can always hire half the poor to kill the other half.”
- Boss Tweed, Gangs of New York movie

“Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves – regret for the past and fear of the future.”

- Fulton Oursler

Remember that one thief (the future) can still be redeemed.

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

- Thomas Jefferson

“Whoever considereth well, will recognize that we have not in youth the same flesh as in childhood, nor in old age the same as in youth; for we suffer a perpetual transmutation, whereby we receive a perpetual flow of fresh atoms, while those that we have received are leaving us.”
Giordano Bruno, 1548 – 1600 (burned at the stake)

“…think of an experience from your childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell as if you were really there. After all, you were really there at the time, weren’t you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell. You weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever YOU are, therefore; YOU are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.”
Steve Grand, OBE, Naturalist, 1958 -

Giodarno Bruno was a philosopher and occult thinker, one of the earliest proponents of the Heliocentric model. He was burned at the stake for his troubles.

I discovered the latter quote listening to the Richard Dawkins talk I posted, The Strangeness of Science. If you listen, you will catch Dawkins agreeing with the statement that it may be better for the planet if humanity were to exterminate itself [49:05]. I say: why not, we’re just some matter that momentarily came together anyway, heh, heh.

The idea expressed in these quotes does beg a question – the question the Caterpillar asked Alice. Who are YOU?