Straight Line Logic: The Inversion

Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic writes The Inversion about peer pressure, technologies, lies, and being a dissident.

Getting along by going along with the patently absurd.

A seamless web, they all believe because they all believe.

The Gordian Knot, Robert Gore, 2000

If it seems like the world has turned upside down it’s because it has. Right is wrong and wrong is right. Truth is lies and lies are truth. Knowledge is ignorance and ignorance is knowledge. Success is failure and failure is success. Reality is illusion and illusion is reality.

It would be comforting to say that this inversion is a plot by nefarious others. Comforting, but not true, in the pre-inversion meaning of the word true. Rather it stems from answers to questions that confront everyone. To think for yourself or believe with the group? To stand alone or cower with the crowd? It’s the conflict between the individual and the collective, and between what’s true and what’s believed.

We live in an age of fear. It’s not fear of germs, war, poverty or any other tangible threat that most besets humanity. It’s the fear of being disliked and ostracized by the group.

If every age has its emblematic technology, ours is social media, with its cloying likes and thumbs up and its vicious cancellations, doxing, and deplatforming. No longer must you wander through life plagued by that nagging insecurity—am I liked? Now you can keep virtual score: you not only know if you’re liked or disliked, you know how much and by whom. Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn’t seem to help; the scoreboards only amplify the insecurity. What was once an occasionally troubling question, privately asked of one’s self, has become a widely held, public obsession.

The official Covid-19 response is the apotheosis of inversion and probably the one that runs it off the rails. There’s a model that has repeatedly erred predicting infection and death rates by orders of magnitude. Use it! Politicians and bureaucrats, the two most power-hungry groups on the planet, are clamoring for unlimited powers to destroy jobs, businesses, economies, lives, and liberty. Give it to ’em, no questions asked! Sunshine, Vitamin D, fresh air, and exercise prevent diseases and lessen their symptoms’ severity. Lock ’em up! Lockdowns aren’t working. Lock ’em up harder! Masks don’t prevent or hinder viral transmission, their packaging says so. Double, triple, or better yet, quadruple mask! At high cycle thresholds, the PCR test throws off many false positives, inflating case counts. Crank up the cycle thresholds until Biden gets in office! Cheap medicines hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin both prevent and cure the disease, provided it’s not too far advanced. Discourage their use! They work better than expensive vaccines. Make vaccinations mandatory! Scores of reputable and eminent doctors and scientists are questioning and criticizing the protocols. Censor them and follow our shapeshifting science! Death counts are inflated because hospitals have a financial incentive to attribute deaths to Covid-19 and anybody who has tested positive and subsequently dies of whatever cause is labeled a Covid-19 death. If they scare people into saving just one life…. The cure is far worse than the disease. Shut up or we’ll shut you up! There’s always germs out there and they constantly mutate, this horseshit could last forever. New Normal, Great Reset. It will last forever, and it will get worse, won’t it? We’ll circle back on that.

Peer pressure is the fundamental force of the social universe. Anyone who’s part of a collective will be pressured to accept its consensus on matters trivial and important. Congruence between what a collective believes and truth is happenstance. The larger the group, the higher the chance of incongruence.

Groups don’t think, they perpetuate and enforce belief. Collectives collectivize what passes for thought, none more so than governments. There’s always the danger that someone might ask why those who rule get to club everyone else into submission. Rulers either suppress that question or try to provide a nominal justification. If they have the clubs, what are they worried about?

The ruling caste is always small compared to the ruled. No matter how many clubs it has and how overmatched the subjects may be, the ruling caste knows its position is more secure if their subjects believe their propaganda and consent to their rule. The underpinnings of frightened compliance with “Do as you’re told or else!” are rickety compared to a chorus chanting in unison “We’re all in this together!” or some such rot.

None are so enslaved as those chained to group belief. Truth is irrelevant, group acceptance paramount. Belief is unquestioned and unchallenged, truth the shunned and hated enemy. Governments have promoted this inversion for centuries, always telling the same lies. Faith in government may be the strongest and longest-lived secular religion, and it’s certainly the one most resistant to questions, investigation, or contrary evidence.

The script never varies. We’re good, they’re bad, exterminate them. Conquest, domination, and empire are our nation’s greatness. Need not greed: those who earn it are selfish for trying to keep it; we’re virtuous for taking it away. Our pieces of paper are good as gold. Your squalor has nothing to do with our opulent lifestyles; be grateful for your bread and circuses. Dissidence must be suppressed; opposition is traitorous. Ruination and death are everyone’s fault but ours. You just weren’t good enough to live up to our ideals.

Inversions can only last so long. People consciously or unconsciously reject them, and reality doesn’t invert. A small coterie in Washington may believe they run a global empire, but Russia and China refuse to kowtow, even nominal allies are backing away, and the costs of maintaining its crumbling empire are helping drive the US into bankruptcy. What US cheerleaders call the best military in the world hasn’t won a significant war since World War II and its fighting forces are being ideologically culled or indoctrinated in wokesterism, systematically rendering it even less fit to fight.

The censors no longer hide their censorship. There are stories that cannot be reported, questions that cannot be asked, investigations that cannot be launched, platforms that cannot be allowed, and issues that cannot be discussed within the captured media. It cried foul when Donald Trump made “fake news” a catch phrase, but it caught on because it confirmed what millions know: much of today’s “news” is fraudulent propaganda.

After a month-and-a-half of one-party rule it’s clear that suppression is only going to get worse. Among those who intellectually stand outside the collective, suppression neither decreases belief in what is suppressed nor increases belief in the party line. They know the truth lies in what’s being kept from them.

Subconsciously, even adherents to the party line never completely believe it. Fully “woke,” you may “know” that Western civilization is a discredited product of the white male patriarchy. However, do you throw yourself from the top of a tall building because the properties of gravity were first described by white English patriarch Isaac Newton?

Psychological dissonance plagues true believers. What are they going to believe: dogma or their own senses and thought processes, such as they are? It’s the root cause of their psychic brittleness: the inability to answer questions or engage in debate, the insistence on ostensible agreement, and the need to suppress anyone who doesn’t go along.

The fragility that tries to adjust reality to belief runs head-on into the desire among those whose behaviors are to be adjusted to live their own lives as they see fit, not to mention reality itself. America’s divide is between those who want to be left alone and those who want to tell them what to do. It’s so much easier for the latter if they can impose at least the appearance of consent on the former through suppression, fraud, or force.

Reality doesn’t invert, no matter how many people believe otherwise. Governments and central banks will debase their fiat debt instruments until the illusion that they’re worth something is discarded. They have every incentive to do so and it’s happening now as governments go broke. Empires crumble because they require more energy and resources to maintain than they generate. The American empire will be no exception. The more production is taxed, regulated, and otherwise penalized, the less production you get. The more indolence is rewarded, the more indolence you get. As government’s power expands, people’s freedom shrinks. You can make people engineers or brain surgeons based on their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference or any other irrelevant factor, but it increases the likelihood that the bridge collapses and the patient dies on the operating table.

A society that corrupts science, the basis for discovering, describing, and employing reality, is doomed. Honest science requires free inquiry and debate. It is a never-ending process of proposing, testing, evaluating, revising and discarding hypotheses for new ones with more explanatory and predictive power. There is no such thing as settled science. The claims that there is with regards to climate, coronaviruses, or any other scientific issue are nothing more than admissions that the purported science is propaganda. Unchallenged science is a contradiction in terms; challenge is the lifeblood of science.

So add science that isn’t science to the long list of inversions that collectively could spell humanity’s doom. Consequences don’t recognize wishful thinking or political diktat. Climate and coronavirus dogma masquerading as science is the Trojan horse ushering in the great reset of a new world order. Global governance, state-approved science, political and cultural canons enforced with jihadist zeal, top-down economic command-and-control, the eradication of any vestiges of liberty, and billions of unthinking adherents will destroy rather than build, compounding today’s inversions and creating new ones.

The danger to all this is individuals who think and act for themselves, those who are woke to the woke, so to speak. The key to standing on the outside, critically examining what’s within, is to abandon any desire to be on the inside. The docile dreck and their puppet-masters within are usually sufficient inducement to stay outside. Once that decision is made, independence of thought is almost assured. (Those who see the inside for what it is and still want in are corrupt beyond redemption.)

Challenge dogma and propaganda and you’re a dissident. Not always a comfortable position, but the dissidents will have the best shot at surviving the coming collapse. The insiders will suffer shattering disillusionment as reality obliterates cherished belief…and the insiders.

The historically unprecedented scale of present inversions guarantees upheaval and change beyond reckoning when reality’s full force can no longer be denied or subverted. Even those who see things as they are and regard themselves as fully prepared will be shocked by what’s to come. At least they will retain the existential essentials of observational power and logic as they sort through the smoldering intellectual landscape, discard the inversions, and get on with the rebuilding.

Straight Line Logic: The Corruptocracy

Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic writes about The Corruptocracy that is our nation.

Most political philosophy is just an elaborate justification for theft and fraud.

What’s called the silent majority is really the ignored majority, who for the most part are happy being ignored. Their lives revolve their families, jobs, friends, and community, not the media, publicity, polls, or politics. They’re sick of elections well before they’ve seen their hundredth campaign ad, received their hundredth mailer, or ignored their hundredth telephone call. They know that politicians are phony and corrupt and make jokes about them, but hope that their rulers don’t screw things up too badly, cross their fingers, and vote for the perceived lesser of two evils.

There’s a shortage of blue-ribbon pedigrees, Ivy League degrees, and gold-plated resumés among the ignored majority, but a surfeit of hard-knocks wisdom and common sense. Benjamin Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” Everybody does foolish things, but by and large, the ignored majority learns from the dear school and puts its lessons to good use.

The gilded class denigrates those outside it: Hillary Clinton deploring the “deplorables,” Barack Obama saying working-class voters, “cling to guns or religion,” and Obama telling entrepreneurs, “you didn’t build that.” Yet, it consistently, almost invariably, demonstrates a complete lack of the common-sense street smarts found in abundance among those it disparages.

The quotes’ condescending arrogance rankles, but at a deeper level illustrate the real division in American politics—between the productive class and those it supports. At the intellectual level it’s the irreconcilable difference between those who believe that value can and should be conferred by the government, and those who know it must be created and produced. It’s believing or not believing that something can be had for nothing.

Freeloaders’ delusion stems from psychology, not ignorance. Every human faces a choice. They can produce value or they can beg, borrow, defraud, or steal it from someone else. For every advance humanity has made, there’s always been someone claiming their unfair share. Most of what we call history is merely an account of who’s stealing or defrauding from whom.

Because production is necessary for human survival, not producing anything of value creates a gaping psychological fissure, one not generally recognized or acknowledged. What’s generally accepted is that humans grasp at rationales and justifications for their actions, not just for the audience to which they’re playing, but for themselves. Most political philosophy is just an elaborate justification for theft and fraud. Political systems don’t spring from philosophies, the philosophies spring from the systems’ actual or potential beneficiaries.

Governments can take every scrap of what is produced. They can pledge every scrap of future production as repayment for their debts. The legitimization of unlimited current and future plunder leads to ever-increasing plunder and debt—and ever-diminishing production. Present governments are merely repeating a cycle that’s played out countless times throughout history.

You would think that government rapacity would be curbed when taxes, regulatory extortion, and debt disincentivize and begin reducing legitimate production. Unfortunately, that assumption flies in the face of historical fact; countless regimes have killed their golden geese. The only regimes that haven’t are those that are currently in the process of doing so.

One among many of rulers’ delusions is that the ruled are buying their lies.
Over time the victims see through the propaganda and narrative management. The lies fool the rulers more than the ruled and are essential psychological support for this predatory and parasitic class.

Commentators from the alternative media bemoan the lack of intelligence and awareness of the American people, and the supposed dominance of the mainstream media narrative. Yet, any number of alternative media commentators, YouTubers, and sites routinely receive more readers or viewers than touted mouthpiece media “powerhouses.” More people watch dissident Paul Joseph Watson’s videos than Rachel Maddow’s nightly screeds, but Maddow receives an inordinate amount of attention from the alternative and mainstream alike and Watson virtually none.

The alternative media’s thousands of sites have eclipsed the mouthpiece media, which exists in a bubble of its own creation. It’s a hugely underreported trend—without fanfare millions of people rejecting the mainstream, reading, researching, and coming to their own conclusions. There’s 330 million Americans and many of them are neither stupid nor duped. It’s just that nobody pays attention to them.

The media bubble envelopes the government-centered corruptocracy and allows those within to preserve the self-deception of personal worth. Someone who lives off the corporate-lobbyist-political food chain, shuffles paper in a government bureaucracy, enforces tax or regulatory extortion, or is otherwise supported in a something-for-nothing scheme cannot have the self-respect that comes from producing value. Instead, the predatory and parasitic classes cling to psychological crutches: conceit, arrogance, condescension, delusion, and willful ignorance.

The most intense predator and parasite condescension is directed at the producers who provide their sustenance. This may seem paradoxical but it’s not. Honest production is an obvious moral rebuke to those who live by theft and fraud. Acknowledging either the value of producers or their own dependence on them would undermine the fragile edifice of their rickety substitutes for self-worth.

Disaffected veterans were the core of a group that would grow to millions, their “faith” in government and the people who ran it obliterated by its repeated failures and lies. Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors. The mainstream media is filled with vituperative, patronizing, and insulting explanations of what’s “behind” the Trump phenomenon. It all boils down to revulsion with the self-anointed, incompetent, pretentious, hypocritical, corrupt, prevaricating elite that presumes to rule this country. It is, in a word, inferior to the populace on the other side of the yawning chasm, the ones they have patronized and insulted for decades, and the other side knows it.

“Much More Than Trump,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 3, 2016, reposted November 6, 2016

Nothing has changed over the last four years, except that the ranks of disaffected have swollen. Trump gave voice to them in 2016 and he’ll do it again in 2020. Once more it’s the productive businessman outsider against a government hack insider. After Russiagate, the impeachment, the coronavirus power-grab, leftist and Marxists riots, and endless media-driven tempests in teapots, the somethings in this country are far more contemptuous of the nothings who presume to rule them—and farcically, have designs on the whole world—than they were four years ago. The ultimate farce is the Harris/Biden ticket: a corrupt, doddering, old fool and a nakedly ambitious shrew who even Democrats don’t like, neither with a scintilla of detectable principle, waging the most inept campaign ever in front of face-masked, socially distanced audiences that number in the tens.

If he gets anything approaching an honest vote count Trump will win in a landslide. The “reputable” pollsters have become another arm of the entrenched powers’ narrative management. Like everything else the corruptocrats have tried, this effort will prove inept. The purported double-digit Biden leads will motivate, not discourage, Trump’s voters. By every other indicator—voter registrations, growing black and hispanic support, the crumbling entertainment and sports complex, the crumbling mainstream media, the ascendent alternative media, millions of new gun owners, backlash against the riots, slowly fading coronavirus hysteria, and off-the-charts attendance and enthusiasm at Trump rallies—Trump’s winning by a country mile.

And let’s not forget Hunter Biden’s hard drive, much as the corruptocracy, Twitter, Facebook, and most of the mainstream media would like us to. The revelations are important not because they reveal that the Bidens are a criminal enterprise—we already knew that—but because they further confirm the suspicions of millions of street-smart, disaffected Americans: our country is a corruptocracy.

If Trump wins and quells the Super Tantrum, he’ll have to do more than give voice to the disaffected. He’s forced the corruptocrats from the depths of their swamp, and he may or may not be blackmailing them for his own purposes. But not a drop of swamp has been drained, and if nothing happens the next four years, Trump’s tenure will be nothing more than a feel-good fantasy for his fans.

He’ll have to either blackmail paid up swampsters William Barr and Christopher Wray to do their jobs or get rid of them for people who will. Nothing less than indictments and prosecutions that cuts a wide swath across the corruptocracy— Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Mueller, Page, Strzok, Haspel, the Biden crime family, Obama, the Clintons, many of the listings in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book, and the rest of their insidious ilk—will do. Arresting Hunter and Joe Biden the day after the election would be a good start.

Trump must put up or shut up on draining the swamp before he can proceed to his long list of other unfinished business. The swamp is the inevitable backwash of a government that has arrogated unlimited power to itself, has first claim on everything produced within the United States, issues debt without limit, and maintains a confederated global empire. Power creates corruptocracies. There is a one in a trillion chance that Trump or any other ostensible outsider changes any of this, and a one in a quadrillion chance that the system reforms itself.

Trump or no Trump, the disaffected will get more disaffected, at least until the system collapses, which it will. The failing of all governments is that they can’t produce, only coerce. What they can force their citizens to produce is astonishingly low compared to what those citizens would produce if left to their own devices in free markets. The productive economy is straining under the tax and debt loads it’s being forced to carry. The debt orgy this year is probably the last straw. The shut-down real economy and debt-bloated financial markets will force a reckoning.

That reckoning will be global and governments will get smaller. Not because anyone within them experiences an intellectual conversion towards less government—and consequently less power—but because they are bankrupt and access to credit will be severely limited. Central banks may continue to buy their governments’ debt with their own devalued debt, but that daisy chain will come to an end as well. A bear market in debt of all stripes and a bull market in interest rates loom. The silver lining: long suffering savers (both of them) and creditors will finally be compensated for the credit risks they bear.

With the crumbling of governments will come the crumbling of current political institutions and boundaries. The breakdown of the corrupt and doomed old order presents the opportunity for the establishment of new orders. What seems inconceivable now may occur with astonishing speed. A year ago, who envisioned what’s transpired so far in 2020?

Millions of salt-of-the-earth, common sense Americans have watched in horror as their country has imploded from lockdown insanity and riots. There’s an exodus from urban hellholes to safer and saner locales. The response to those who say breakdown can’t happen is that it’s already begun.

Alasdair Macleod is writing about Europe, but what he says applies to the United States:

The fate of the euro will be shared with the majority — if not all — of other fiat currencies for reasons specific to them. The recovery from the ashes of government incompetence can be swift — a matter of a year or two, so long as successor governments quickly learn that free markets, sound money and minimal interference from government are all required for the restoration of economic progress. Additionally, all socialist policies must be discarded, and the profit motive and individual wealth creation embraced.

“The destruction of the euro,” Alasdair Macleod, goldmoney.com, October 22, 2020

There will be jurisdictions, some born out of secession or insurrection, that will institute “free markets, sound money, and minimal interference from government,” along with the concomitant essentials: freedom and the protection of individual rights, because they work and have worked throughout history. They are the quickest way to recover from economic and financial devastation. Most importantly, freedom is the only moral system, the only system compatible with productive survival, and the only system that promotes human happiness.

Freedom, rather than Trump, represents the best hope for the righteously disaffected.

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