TEST
From The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil by Erich Fromm. As quoted in
people of the Lie by Scott Peck.
Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life. The longer
From The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil by Erich Fromm.
“They are not aware when life asks them a question”
From The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil by Erich Fromm:
“Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life. The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the our heart softens — or better perhaps, comes alive. . . . Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually if becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action. On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. Between the extreme when I can no longer do a wrong act and the extreme when I have lost my freedom to right action, there are innumerable degrees of freedom of choice. In the practice of life the degree of freedom to choose is different at any given moment.
If the degree of freedom to choose the good is great, it needs less effort to choose the good. If it is small, it fakes a great effort, help from others, and favorable circumstances. . . . Most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they still have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time.”
Each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative, until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action. On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender, and eventually freedom is lost. Between the extreme when I can no longer do a wrong act and the other extreme when I have lost my freedom to right action, there are innumerable degrees of freedom of choice. In the practice of life the degree of freedom to choose is different at any given moment. If the degree of freedom to choose the good is great, it needs less
Fromm, Erich. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (pp. 142-143). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
most people fail in the art of living not because they are inherently bad or so without will that they cannot live a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide. They are not aware when life asks them a question, and when they still have alternative answers. Then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time.
Fromm, Erich. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (p. 145). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
economy
hoover institute (Didnt’ think to consider that)
as if rush’s attitude had no bearing
lincoln
mindset (elizbeth holmes) something’s not right
MIND THE GAP
i don’t need to know anything about economics to know that a multi-trillion war
QUESTIONS HIS CREDIBILITY
I HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW TO UNDESTAND
HOW TO
HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO YOU — HOW TO UNDERSTAND
EXPLAIN WHAT YOU DON’T UNDESTAND — BUT HOW TO UNDERSTAND .
THE QUOTE FROM THAT ARTICLE ON THINKING
GREAT MINDS
Until the rise of podcasts, twitter, and the various forms of independent media / journalism, people weren’t really aware how legacy media was influencing their thinking. I think people are finally waking up and may surprise you here, especially if more talk about it.
The crude, dirty ‘brutes’ of the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels. The Yahoos are irrational people and represent the worst side of humanity. By contrast, the wise and gentle Houyhnhnms, their masters, are rational horses and represent humanity at its best.
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
Part 1 of 7
A young man sittin’ on the witness stand
The man with the book says “Raise your hand”
“Repeat after me, I solemnly swear”
The man looked down at his long hair
And although the young man solemnly swore
Nobody seemed to hear anymore
And it didn’t really matter if the truth was there
It was the cut of his clothes and the length of his hair— Johnny Cash, What is Truth . . .
When it comes to ascertaining the truth, I don’t care what your cause is, who’s in the White House, who controls Congress or the courts. I learned early on in life that what you want gets in the way of what you see. I love moments of truth that put my principles to the test. One of my favorites is the Florida election fiasco of 2000. I just wanted the right thing to be done — whether it served my interests or not was irrelevant.
That sense of fairness is so foreign I might as well be speaking another language.
Taking on the entire country by myself is worlds away from what everyone else is doing. That makes it exponentially more complex to explain: Not because it really is that complicated, but rather because human nature goes out of its way to obfuscate the obvious: Gleefully gutting the truth and getting applauded for it.
Anyone wanting to know the truth would not behave in ways that ensure they never will.
You’ve probably heard of yellowcake — how about uranium hexafluoride? Does calling someone a “Bush hater” strike you as a valid counter to that question? Never mind this story goes straight to the top with who’s in the White House right now — on very specific culpability to boot.
How so? How I’d love to live in a world where you’d ask not out of party-line pursuits — but because it’s on the trail to the truth.
Speaking of yellowcake . . .
To this day, the willfully uninformed still believe that yellowcake was discovered in Iraq (never mind that yellowcake had been under IAEA seal since the 90s). Before they watched that clip — how many of those people could tell me what hexafluoride is?
And how many of those same people couldn’t even get this much straight?
By Design
America Remains Mired in the Murky
What does it say to you that on evidence claimed as components to build a nuclear bomb — the “debate” was hijacked by 10-second sound bites? Shouldn’t any debate establish what the debate is actually about? What does it say about a country that can’t even establish that much on a matter of this magnitude?
What’s worse than miserably failing to inform yourself for 20 years:
Is that when someone comes along who put it all on a silver platter — you swat it away with pride: All so you can keep spreading the demonstrably false for satisfaction in full. “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” That quote’s been around in various forms for over 300 years (evidently the original being from 1710):
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
I know the feeling — all too well
For two decades: I’ve been practically spit on for following principles those same people promote on a daily basis basis. The rotor speed required to separate uranium isotopes doesn’t care who’s president, and when it comes to ascertaining the truth, neither do I.
In order to maintain such speeds, the material properties of centrifuges are as critical as it gets. You don’t need to interview a world-renowned nuclear scientist to figure that out — but I like to be thorough. To claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive documentary ever done on WMD, I would know:
The road to reality is blocked by detours designed to keep you going in circles. Purveyors of poppycock reroute you with narratives that avoid detail like Black Death. The way out is to start with an inconsistency or two that’s narrow in scope — and take the trail where it leads. To ascertain the truth on any topic If you’ve got something concrete to go on — that’s your point of entry. By all means, keep the door open in every direction.
But by nailing down the definitive first, it paves a clearer path to all the rest.
This country does the exact opposite on everything — lumping it all together and never even approaching where you should have started in the first place:
This chart is misleading in several respects . . . Beams centrifuge never actually worked . . . We can infer . . .
Sounds pretty sloppy to me!
Perhaps we should have a conversation to clear up what all this means on issues that have eroded reason beyond recognition?
As I said on in my doc:
Out of 31 tubes in subsequent testing, only one was successfully spun to 90,000 RPM for 65 minutes — which the C.I.A. seized on as evidence in their favor. One D.O.E. analyst offered a superb analogy of that contorted conclusion:
“Running your car up to 6,500 RPM briefly does not prove that you can run your car at 6,500 RPM cross country. It just doesn’t. Your car’s not going to make it.”
In an industry where fractions of a millimeter matter, these guys were playing horseshoes with centrifuge physics.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
Who are “these guys”?
Who are the “most experts” Powell was referring to in his UN speech? That’s the untold story I told 10 years ago when I wrote and produced the exhaustive documentary ever done on Iraq WMD. I had 50 pages on that issue in my unfinished book before I wrote one word of that script.
And yet when I went to interview that world-renowned nuclear scientist for my research, my journey had just begun.
My surgical specificity in this clip puts this lie in its place in 5 minutes alone. To take a story this complex and convoluted and boil its essence down to a few minutes was no small feat.
Trillion Dollar Tube
Imagine what I did with 160
“There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with [Hamilton]. He must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.”
— Major William Pierce (Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton)
Wouldn’t it be absurd to share that quote if my clip contained nothing but trite talking points? Some circles are not burdened by squaring their walk with their talk. They seem to think that advertising virtue equates to embodying it.
Case in point
People who talk glibly about “intelligence failure” act as if intelligence agencies that are doing their job right would know everything.
— Professional Know-It-All (PKIA for short)
D.O.E’s standard is to spin a tube at 20% above 90,000 RPM before failure — so 48,000 short is a pretty loose definition of “rough indication.”
And since the entire point of testing should be to replicate the conditions of centrifuges, one would think that the full-blown testing would be performed before the N.I.E. was completed.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
Between PKIA’s words and mine
Which ones strike you as glib?
And these are on the mild end of the savagery I’ve seen:
You couldn’t carry PKIA‘s jockstrap!
Seriously? Get a life. It doesn’t matter what you say, he’s better than you basically in everything.
You deserved to be treated that way! You’re a moron and pathetic character assassin
Holy shit…. a video of a circle jerks with a nut in the center talking about RPMS. Yet somehow PKIA is a liar.
Who’s PKIA?
We’ll get to that, but what does it say to you that I came up with an alias just so his crowd will weigh his words in isolation from his immaculate image? What would you call someone who shoots their mouth off without addressing the evidence — but banks on their fabricated reputation to create the impression that they did?
Back to PKIA in a bit.
In addition to interviewing world-renowned nuclear scientist, Dr. Houston Wood, I also corresponded with David Albright (the physicist above who wrote extensively on the tubes) — as well as Colin Powell’s chief of intelligence at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Greg Thielmann said the following in 2013:
It will be up to Iraqis to debate whether their country now has a brighter future than it otherwise would have had without foreign invasion and occupation in the first decade of the new century. But it is uniquely incumbent on Americans to understand who and what were responsible for an enterprise that proved so costly in terms of U.S. lives lost, money spent, international reputation tarnished, and a campaign against al Qaeda diverted.
America just casually moved on
I didn’t — as I knew then what few know now:
The immeasurable value in the willingness to be wrong, understanding why, and looking to learn from it. And that not doing so — increasingly compounds the consequences of no accountability. Look around!
Half the country took the word of professional know-it-alls over nuclear scientists. And when your camp came up empty on WMD — you just bought more bullshit from the same people who sold you the first batch:
Shrewd!
Preach responsibility and take none
You can’t seem to comprehend that I don’t care what damage the truth inflicts upon politicians of any brand. I have this crazy idea that across-the-board accountability is always in the best interests of the nation.
As for my frustration — I have this thing about people who regurgitate nonsense in the face of overwhelming evidence that counters their baseless beliefs.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
Speaking of preaching responsibility and taking none:
Back to PKIA
This man peddled partisan hackery on the biggest & most costly lie in modern history. Flagrantly ignoring irrefutable evidence of mathematical certainty (deception that shaped everything you see today). On top of unconscionably ignoring concrete evidence of world-altering consequence, he has a habit of toeing the party line.
Yet his disciples see him as some kind of saint-like Sherlock Holmes. The cult-like following of this fraud is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. As I’ve been in the trenches battling hermetically sealed minds for decades, that’s saying something.
And that — is an opportunity!
How do we make people realize they’ve been lied to? You have to knock down one small pillar that’s easier to reach.
The people who Tweeted those lines I combined from a conversation I came across — had no idea that they perfectly captured the principle of my Clear the Clutter plan. I’ve got the perfect pillar — as exposing PKIA is my bridge to expose it all.
It’s time to start solving problems instead of endlessly talking about them and getting nowhere. To do that — first we gotta clear the clutter that’s crippled this country. And to do that, you don’t go after everything, you go after one thing that ties to everything — and you do it by holding one man to his own standards.
A student wrote of her psychology professor and co-author of the book below:
Tim Wilson taught me the importance of breaking problems down into more manageable pieces.
Lo and behold, at the bedrock of my idea is exactly that. And I don’t need mass appeal to make this happen, I just need to get to one man. Their field is forever fighting the forces of human nature while my solution banks on it. To understand that — you’d have to understand the story and different motivations of the influential figures involved.
It’s a domino effect by design — and whad’ya know:
Elliot Aronson was chosen by his peers as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century
— Amazon’s About the Author
The forward he wrote in When Prophecy Fails was super helpful in framing my message in my documentary that illustrates the psychological gymnastics of human nature. Dr. Aronson was helpful again when he put me onto his friend and fellow renowned psychologist, Dr. Phil Zimbardo — “a very smart guy with incredible energy,” he added. Since Dr. Zimbardo is 90 years old — that’s saying something. For medical reasons, he’s unable to get involved, but in response to an email on the essence of my idea, he wrote:
Very Interesting and original
Even in his condition — he could see what so many can’t. They’re busy — and why bother considering fresh ideas that might work when you can stay busy on what won’t?
Alas, if not for these cesspools of certitude below — we’d be well on our way to realizing how my idea could be the catalyst to turn the tide. In this fantasyland that follows: You can win an argument without even knowing what the issue is about. How people behave in denying the undeniable daily would be unthinkable for me to do ever.
V for Victory — How Fitting . . .
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
— Attributed to Mark Twain
Imagine America as an engine and you come along with a cross-section of it to explain why it’s not working. Since your audience shares your concerns, you’d think they’d be interested in understanding the internals of the problem. But they spend all their time talking about parts made by people they don’t like — never considering the defects in their own parts.
And even though you’ve got a rock-solid idea for how to fix the engine (or at least make it run on reason): They’d rather spend the rest of their lives complaining about problems than take responsibility for their part in creating them. The image above is for my 15-part series on factions acting as force fields of fallacy for the Left & Right: Shielding you from the whole truth while you’re pursuing part of it believing you’re after all of it.
My efforts revolve around how people allow emotion to run roughshod over reason when their interests are at stake. When I returned from interviewing a world-renowned nuclear scientist, Dr. Houston Wood — the aftermath of another controversial event gave me a golden opportunity to illustrate exactly that.
I needed a way to illustrate irrational behavior without showing any favoritism — and now I had it.
That connection becomes clear pretty quickly, but still that wasn’t enough to ward off confusion. 3 minutes and 33 seconds into the Prologue — the parallel in the Profile Principle is revealed. But right on cue with the times: People make up their minds on lickety-split perception alone. By taking a moment to absorb what someone’s saying (perhaps with a little patience, a modicum of courtesy, and a couple minutes more):
Ahhh . . .now I see where he’s going with this
Imagine!
There are powerful forces that make damn sure you don’t — and shows!
There’s an endless supply of bios broadcasting beliefs.
Here’s what I’m broadcasting
I’ve always hated Twitter and when I’m done doing what I gotta do — I’m never goin’ back. Until then, I’m sending out a certain set of messages looking for intelligent life (fiercely independent thinkers who want to solve problems — not endlessly talk about them).
Think of my signals as a poor man’s SETI:
I’ve got an idea — and it’s got teeth
There’s a way we can harness folly from the past for the benefit of the future.
A.K.A. Learning
It’s as outside-the-box as it gets but rooted in timeless truths America made outdated. I’ve already done all the work: I just need a little help in having it land in the right hands. I have a very specific target audience to get this in gear, so it wouldn’t take much.
One email could set off a chain of events that could open the door to the kind of conversation this nation’s never had.
To the uneducated, abstract ideas are unfamiliar; so is the detachment that is necessary to discover a truth out of one’s own knowledge and mental effort. The uneducated person views life in an intensely personal way — he knows only what he sees, hears or touches and what he is told by friends.
As the unknown sage puts it, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
But more than ever, even the most educated minds act in an uneducated manner in service of their interests — and do catastrophic damage by doing so.
Even the best of the bunch are part of the problem they’re trying to solve.
Going by the galaxies filled with rock stars of reasoning across the social media universe — I should have no shortage of people eager to examine my idea and discuss how we could improve on it and proceed. You tell me where those people are and I’ll gladly send out my signals to them.
If you’re not interested in hearing me out and having meaningful conversation — we have nothing to talk about and I wish you well. I’d just ask that you please block me and politely move along. But if you’re game for good old-fashioned conversation — please contact me through the site, Anchor.Press.gg@gmail.com, or DM (Direct Message) on Twitter: As I no longer respond to Tweets or superficial fragments of any kind.
My idea is simple
Cutting through our Crap is King culture to get you to see it — is not.
Unlike most of America
I don’t have situational rules
We’re well beyond “disagreement” in America — this is madness (countless millions miserably failing to follow even the most fundamental methods of how understanding works). The second you shun evidence that doesn’t fit the narrative you want — you have contaminated your judgment.
Debunking the WMD delusion & Trayvon tale is a conduit for showing how this nation systematically derails debate. “Everybody believed Iraq had WMD” is not a valid argument any more than “armed only with Skittles.” By the way — how many of you know what Trayvon actually looked like? It’s not the kid on People magazine, I assure you.
I’m not interested in defending Zimmerman — my aim is to expose the irrational behavior of blindly defending Martin and the damage you did by doing so.
Thanks to the internet and the cable clans paving the way for the onslaught of the utterly absurd — everything is poisoned by perception and hypocrisy now. America’s in perennial pursuit of ideologies — warfare waged with galactic levels of baggage & bullshit bolstered by . . .
opinions lightly adopted but firmly held . . . forged from a combination of ignorance, dishonesty, and fashion
— Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom
You want to be taken seriously on race relations when you won’t even concede to what kind of can he was carrying? And it’s pure fantasy to think that you can ignore key dimensions of a problem and magically solve it.
Chris Rock didn’t come up with this sketch out of thin air.
But for me to suggest this is the entire problem — would be as preposterous as you denying it’s part of it.
On that note
The Right wants the Left and the black community to get its act together on matters deeply woven into the fabric of America’s long history of brutality and disgrace: Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, murder, decades of civil rights violations, questionable shootings, and so on.
While the Right won’t even look at the material properties of a tube. What’s wrong with that picture — and this one?
Hmm, so the dimensions exactly match the tubes used in Iraq’s history of manufacturing the Nasser-81 mm artillery rocket (a reverse-engineered version of the Italian Medusa)
Shallow thinkers do not think beyond the immediate and the observable. They usually take information at face value and only look at immediate consequences. They are not capable of looking at all sides of an issue or think deeply about the issue before making decisions or drawing conclusions . . .
They also believe that their opinion is based on deep thinking because they genuinely believe that their opinion is based on truth and facts. Whereas, deep thinkers look at the whole sequence of events and the consequences.
When we dig deeper, we understand better. We can compare different outcomes, examine, tear apart, and make cognizant judgments that are derived from different mental models.
Left and Right, I’ve yet to find a single person who digs beyond the depth of their immediate domain of interest. In our entirely transactional times, America endlessly rehashes topics of today — never once considering the totality of events that created them (or even having a notion of the need to).
With the issues I address — you might as well be saying the Civil War wasn’t germane to the assassination of Lincoln.
Prologue / Part I
One Voice Became Two 