Do You Need A License To Think?
It looks like most people feel they do...
Ouch! That hurt!
I have written about controlled opposition before:
However, it’s a mystery to me why it is still so popular, despite the fact that it accomplishes nothing, except for holding its audience’s attention captive. Red herrings do exactly that: engage your thoughts in futile activities, preventing you from considering the important things.
Controlled opposition has a few important features that might explain its success with the crowds:
It provides hope, based on false premises, which desperate minds embrace, because they don’t want to think another step ahead and ask, “Okay, and then what?”
Followers of fake opposition expect someone else to do the thinking for them, because they don’t feel “qualified” or they want someone else to blame for their own actions.
Somehow, fakes manage to sell themselves as the “voice of the people.” American conformism is deeply rooted in the educational system and people tend to feel safer, when other people “agree” with them. If only they knew that the guy next to them is also there for the same reason and, ultimately, none of them is committed to an actual belief or dedicated to a cause!…
Once people even start investing their time, energy, and money into keeping track and supporting controlled opposition, they usually adhere to the course, because it would be too painful to admit that they have been tricked or even used. These are the “believers,” who expect you to “keep an open mind,” while they adamantly stick to their guns and every single valid counter-argument only strengthens their irrational resolution.
Following “expert” advice (for which the “experts” take no responsibility and often even move the goalposts) makes co-dependent people feel smart. Such people need constant validation from others, because they don’t know enough about themselves to develop healthy self-respect.
Fakes use simple arguments (usually against straw men) that even simple minds can relate to, but when such thoughts come from authorities, who are supposed to be highly qualified “experts,” simple minds indulge in the delusion of being “smart.”
It’s scary how many of those creatures exist and, despite their being intellectually disadvantaged, even have temporal and pecuniary sources to spend on being misled!
***
Fake opposition relies on the simply trick to oppose the official narrative to a certain extent. Here is a joke about the way it works:
Wife arrives home and finds the house completely empty. The furniture and everything else are gone. Still, he finds his husband standing in the middle of the living room, practically motionless.
She asks him,
“What happened here?”
“Honey, we had robbers. They took everything.”
“Why are you standing there?”
“If you take a closer look, I am standing in a circle. The robbers drew it with a crayon and told me not to ever step out of it!”
“So, you were just standing there, while they were emptying the place?”
“No, dear, of course not. I stepped out of the circle three times!”
Somewhat incredibly, a lot of people fall for it, because they are eager to find their hero whom they expect to act instead of them, even when their own lives depend on it. Such heroism apparently finds its appeal to the crowd, whose members don’t feel qualified, certified, capable, or willing to make up their own minds. They want the “experts” to take the responsibility, even if it kills them.
And it did and it will.
***
As long as you can read and use your brain, you don’t need a license to think. Nobody else will take responsibility for your actions, even if the decisions you are following are someone else’s.
Gary D. Barnett has his own thought about “waking up,” which I read shortly after scribbling my article:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/08/gary-d-barnett/how-does-one-wake-up/
“It is like living in a wilderness of mirrors. No fact goes unchallenged.”
— Bruce Babbitt
“But everybody’s afraid to take physical action because we tend to be optimists. We tend to hope for the best, as we do right now. We hope that this will blow over, and maybe it will. But it boils down to what will you do, maybe five minutes from now, when you’re confronted one-on-one with an apparatchik from the State who gives you an order.”
--Doug Casey
Most people don't like thinking, or at least they don't like thinking deeply which for me, is REAL thinking. Also, those who may think deeply can and do lie to themselves and fail to challenge their prejudices and biases and preconceived notions and in so doing, deep thinking is transformed into a hunt for validation versus a quest for greater understanding.
Take the whole spectacle of Alex Jones and Infowars. Infowars is baby food. It's Gerber. It's predigested veggies and meats and fruits tainted with toxins so all you have to do is swallow. No chewing required. Think about the morons who harassed the Sandy Hook victims' families based on Infowars "reporting." There was no thinking going on. There was Alex Jones and Infowars manipulating people with conspiracy garbage in order to sell them nutraceuticals and make tens of millions of dollars exploiting their naivete.