Pornography

Pornography fulfills a gnawing and voracious drive within society. Sex, because of its taboo imlications, in some feelings of guilt. In addition, in this environment, it is forever an area of various degrees of unfulfilled drives and frustration.

In a society where sexual guilt and privation is instilled early in life and where there is considerable repression, suppression and deprovation, every individual will have some level of sexual frustration, often acute.

If you examine the contents of any pornogrphy, you will inmediately see that it largely portrays, voyeuristically, that which cannot be achieved in reality, sexual fulfillment amid the unnatural mandates of the culture. It reflects the distorted and pathological sexual drives born out of implanted guilt; repression and high levels of frustration, In pornography, sex is presented as somethig dirty, sunful and ignoble. the high demand for pornographic material reflects the high level of sexual frustration within the society.

It also reflects the various shades of pathological sex drives the culture has inevitably spawned. The prevalence of rape,s adism, masochism, sodomy, bestiality, etc., portrayed in pornography represents harmful drives which have been stimulated through a distortion of natural drives and maintained largely through continued cuntural delusions and strictures.

The message here is that we can no longer Project the blame for Evil upon some creature of the Underworld (which God supposedly created), but must look to the evil within our own ideas and systems. The evil is carried by our cultures and by us. All of our insanities have their roots in a society's delusions.

Pornography provides an artificial bridge, uniting the world of religious condemnation with sexual fulfillment, a condition that can never be achieved in reality. A universal characteristic of pornography is that it portrays sex as something evil which must be hidden. It follows the Judeo-Christian ethic, but pairs the accepted evil with sexual excitement, protraying sex with all the negative connotations society and the religions heap upon it, while providing stories where sexual fulfillment, in all its distorted forms is, never-the.less, achieved.

What is denied the reader or the viewer in reality is provided in fantasy. In all probability, the pornography market could not exist at anywhere near its present level, if at all, were  not for the pathology of religión. The same holds true for virtually all sexual activity involving degradation and/or forcé or injury, for all sex crimes where there is violation and, all to often, mutilation.

We have a natural 'right' to protect ourselves and others against damaging attack. This is a right that should never be relinquished, However, we should only empower government to step in where the individual is unable to defend, carefully limitin government involvement.

The Mother: Victim and Vector

There is a need to consider the differences between man and woman in terms of the way they tend to think. Just why this difference exists is not entirely clear but it is sure to be strongly related to adaptive mechanisms related to differences in gender roles.

The woman's role has differed from the male's, of necessity. As the bearer of the Young, which requires an extended period of protection and care before the offspring can provide for its own needs, her role has been more confining than that of the male. The woman and child have to be protected and provided for and, normally, spend a long period of intense interrelationship. The establishment and maintenance of a safe 'nest' has ever been the woman's chief concern and focus.

Toward this end she has to be the pragmatist, manupulating the man and other aspects of her environment, using and odoing what-ever was neccessary to achieve this end. Forther, the role of mother meant endless work and attention to small details.

Being largely dependent upon the producrivity and protection of the male, her behavior has characterictically been largely determined by, or dependent upon, the male´s activity. This may account for what appears to be more emotionally based and manipulative behavior than the male. Her role, historically, ahas provided Little time or opportunity for intelectual pursuits and complex patterns of behavior based upon inductive reasoning. She is probably more adept at accessing sublingual activities of the brain.

NOw, in modern societies, we see a diversification of the woma's role virtually as wide as human endeavor itself, from truck driver to politicaian to scientist to astronaunt. The woman is still fulfilling the role of mother and nest-tender even though she usually also spends a large part of her time as bread-winner. Even though job requirements may necessitate behavior determined by unemotional reasoning, she would appear to be as emotionally biased as her forebears, behavior and decisions being determined more by hoy it 'feels' than by being the end product of a reasoning process. Both men and women are inclined to make emotional decisions. However, the women appears to be more emotionally determined than the man.

Should this be true, it has serious implications for society since it is the mother who is the primary transmitter of cultural information to the very Young child. In the child's earliest and most formative and vulnerable years, it is primarily the mother who plants the first sedes of societies' fantasies and insanities.

The woman more often accepts the packaged belief systems of the clture and transmits these to the children. It is usually she who imparts the belief in a god, who implants a wide array of fears and feelings of insecurity and who leaves the child largely defenseless in terms of accurate reasoning patterns. It is also the woman who usually begins the process of instilling the belief in the child that sex is evil and dirty. She is both the victim, and the vector, the carrier and transmitter of cultural diseases.

The man also imparts hos share of irrationality, of course, but it is the woman who spends the most time with the very Young child, It is she who has the closest and most influential contact with the child during those first few years of greatest impressionability and vulnerability.

 

RELIGION AND SEX

 

From the mist of time before recorded history, even before the codification of man's 'evel' nature, religión has player the primary roll in defininf sexul roles in the various cultures throughout history.

Sincé sexuality is a vital natural drive which greatly affects everyone, it becomes the source of great power for any instutition which can gain dominion over its expression. Instilling belief in this área transfers tremendous power to the institutions The technique used by western religions is to first condemn the drive as something basically evil and unclean; something for which one should feel guilt, then to proscribe all but a narrow menas and set of circumstances under which the expression of the drive is sanctioned. Naturally, that expression will be in line with the fulfilling of the religion's agenda.

The greatest leverage for control and manipulation is probably in the instilling of guilt feelings and taboo. These can be generalized and used to steer behavior in virtually any direction, the taboo generating public rage toward any transgressor. This is one of the primary menas of undercutting self-reliance and the generation of dependency. The destruction of self-sufficiency becomes an important precursor to maintaining a following. It is an important precondition in gaining dherents who will not stray from the dogma.

In Western cultures the manipulation of sexuality has been the primary means of 'keeping the woman in her place', that is, pregnant and in the nest, producing more followers for the church. It has been the primary mechanism for keeping her role as that of a baby Factory, and promary teacher of the culture's various dogma.

She provides the institutions, especially the religions, with increasing numbers to exploit, already infected with basic indoctrination; the preliminary hoooks, in the form of the beliefs she has instilled in the child already firmly in place.

This area of manipulation by the religions has been the primaty menas of keeping men in control as leaders. this control is still intact while millions of women do battle with very personal demons in their own private hells.

I can immediately recall three cases of permanent damage due directly to religious teachings. All three were women deeply inmersed in the same religión, although at different times and in different circumstances. They represent different damage from different perspectives, but religión strongly affecting the lives of all these women.

One was a Young woman about 20 years old with a seemingly healthy sex drive, at least in that it was too stron to be denied. However, after each sexual encounter, after having reaching a climax, she would experience nausea and spend considerable time in the bathroom, retching. After all, sex was dirty, evil and disgsting. this woman wold eventually overcome her passions, becoming frigid and a 'ball buster', a large part of the 'evel' projected onto men.

Another was a college student in a design class who exhibited conceptual distortions in every area of activity. In one instance, the class was given the assignment of designinga 'feelie box' that would provide a tactile experience representing a lover. The box was to have a curtained hole through which one cold reach in and achieve a tactile experience representing some aspect of that stident's idea of a lover. This girl's box was fitted with a large pon cushion, with many pins, all pointing outward. When asked why?, she explained that they represented her most dominant feelings about touching someone, discomfort of an electric shock.

Here was a Young woman who had come to physical maturity with no commentsirate emotional or factualknowledge development in terms of her own sexuality. Naive and ignorant, life for this woman will never match the preconceived idealizations she has internalized in place of the stuff of real life. She will always feel cheated and never feel at one with herself or with nature. the world will never match her expectations. This girl eventually joined a religious order.

The third was a woman in her late thirties who was the mother of ten living children, She was robustly healthy and had a powerful sex drive. However, she had reached a compromiso between the sexual pleasures she enjoyed and he guilt it generated. When caught inthe cascading throws of climax she would gasp: "Give me a baby! Give me a baby!". Even so, she expressed that shs still felt she was doing something wrong.

Significantly, all three were Roman Catholic. All three had been from families who were deeply involved in the religión, had been immersed in it all their lives, and would not quiestion any aspect of the dogma.

The Seeds of Sexual Distortion

Human cultures are riddled with myths, fantasies and delusions. Out of these grow the taboos, destructive acultural impratives, dysfunctional behavior, and defective systems which, in turn, insure that Homo Sapiens continues to be the most disturbed and vicious animal on this planet.

Virtually all of our ignorance and misdirection results from instituted and codified conceptual pathogens. The individual generates Little of his or her own conceptual structure, mainly accepting and internalizing the instituted conceptual baggage of culture.

Any delusional information will generate some form of dysfuntion within the individual and the society. The highly deluded individual is also highly vulnerable to further false indoctrination. The most difficult cognitive problema for the individual is simply that of recognizing cultural teachings as being largely delusional. Cultural identity is usually an euphemism for cultural delusion.

In an environment structured to maintain delusion, one finds Little definitive information, and virtually no encouragement toward orienting people to the realities. Falsehoods infect every sector of invlvement and inquirí. There are few, if any, aspects of existence is which our institutional sources present a clear and accurate view. The delusional a-priori infects and distorts all cognizance. Little exists in reality as presented by our cultures. This cannot be emphasized enough. Everything gets distorted.

The overwhelming use of language and custom in human societies functions to support delusional cognitive systems. Our language is more often used to obfuscate tan to enlighten; to hide, rather tan expose; to generate confusión, not understanding. The overwhelming use of a language is to propagandize and to amintain the institutions and the debilitating belief. All to maintain the institutions and the objective reality and the development of cognitive integrity.

Were our obectives more toward discovery and the acceptance of factual reality, we would have systems and societies able to make corrections. Where there is broad rejection of reality, perceptions becme divergent from knowledge and selling must be on an emotional basis instead of apprealing to reason ando índices of evidence. Emotional bias is accentuated at the expense of reason. Nowhere is propaganda more in use than in institutional manipulation of human sexuality. In no area of fundamental human function does one find more rejection of the realities than in the area of sex. For the greater numbers, this is an area of frustration, of distorted drives and delusional expectations.

Sexuality is the most all-pervasive area of taboo. the basis for much of this taboo stems from Western and Middle Eastern religious teachings which deem sexual gratification as ignoble, if not evil and amintain an "obscenity of the flesh" that poisons, distorts and frustrates our natural drives.

On a physiological basis, sexual drives are governed primarily by chemistry, through hormonal secretios. These chemicals trigger physiological and emotional responses. The development of human sexual mechanisms and drives has its bigginings in the zygote and continues through childhood to adulthood, changing endlessly throughout life.

this is an area of human drives and function that cannot be denied and, therefore, provides a vulnerable Access point for hogh levels of manipulation and control of the individual. By implating associated guilt and fear, high levels of conflict, stress and deprovation can be induce. The reduction of these unpleasant conditions can be used to shape behavior.

Yet, where normal drives are in conflict with unnatural taboos and cultural proscriptions, supperession of behavior by society causes pressures and dostortions to build to eventual explosive levels, tendencies that would otherwise never reach levels of expression can become truely devastatin when they are not longer contained.

 

THE EARLY ASSAULT ON SEXUALITY

 

It is in childhood that most of our emotional and cognitive distortions have their roots. The damage, to a large degree, is permanent. With the subject, and the fact, of childhood sexuality being taboo and childhood sexual drives being suppressed, almost invariably punished, there is Little ability to avoid either the instillation of guilt and other negative attitudes and associations, or the effects.

A taboo area is like a closed infection, it is where the problems build but cannot be examined, cannot be aired, drives cannot be fulfilled and reduced; where relaxed discussions and experimentation cannot take place, allowing individuals, children or adults, to work out their needs as natural aspects of life. The problems feed upon themselves, and grow.

In is in childhood that the sedes are sown for virtually every functional problema of adulthood, sexuality being just one serious and vulnerable area.

 

The Failure to Educate

The Public School System is fatally flawed by goals which do not reflect reality. As such, ut can never be effective in educating toward a truly functional social system. Under its present premise structure, both the system and its product will forever be at odds with reality. In addition, both will continue to ferment conflict, internatlly, as well as externally with other irrationalities.

Harmony with nature, as well as among groups and individuals, can come only through dealind in trhth and reality. The attempt to abridge reality is the root cause of all destructive uman conduct. Ignoring this fact will not make ir go away.

As has been indicated elsewhere, our Government is a fair representation of the society. Its' urrationalities reflect ideas held by an overwhelming majority of citizens. Government cannot be expected to determine what would constitute an effective public school system, or any other system.

Religion and Government

Religión is the great dementor. It functions to deny any rational basis for existence and maintain a created Cosmos without principles, other tan the arbitrary will of "God". Once these a-priori have been implanted, the individual is rendered incapable of accepting the factual nature of exitence, as per the principle of Reciprocal Cognitive Exclusión (RCE). In order to maintain the belief, the reciprocal reality must be denied or excluded.

Religión provides the mythical basis for authority and Authoritarianism, providing a foundation and rationale for authoritarian governing. It renders the  individual impotent, ignirant of the physical realities and unable to reason critically or accept corrective information. the individual is unable to recognize or resist either the degenerative processes or the parasitical nature of the controlling institutions of religión and current forms of government.

The indoctrinated citizen does not grasp the role religión play in preparing and maintaining population submissive to authoritarian governing.

Given the breadth and depth of facutal knowledge available today, authoritarian governing would probably not be posible, were it not for the degenerative effects of religion. This is the ubiquitous functional relationship, and mutual affinity between religion and government.

The Inherently Flawed 'God' Concept

The concept of 'God' contains implied contradictions or absurdities which, if recognized by the believer, would probably result in its immediate rejection. Quite often yo will hear a child, having been told that God created everything, blurt out the quiestion. 'But, who created God?', hitting the target dead center. Even a small child can often sense the absurdity of the concept of an omnipotent god.

To say that 'God' has existed forever and created everything explains nothing and leaves us with the concept of an unfathomable existence, a magic universo where anything can happen. This belief is highly destructive to the intellect of the individual, particularly that of a child.

However, as we continue to examine the nature of real existence, the particulars of how it Works become evident and understandable. As opposed to the Gawd did it. 'Cliché', we now understand the controlling mechanisms that are at the level of the primary particles. These controls are internal, not imposed from beyond nature.

The concepts of 'God' and 'omnipotence' require something beyond a simple divergent from manifest existence, it constitutes a belief in magic. This is the fundamental insanity, believing in magic is to believe that anything is possible, a complete departure from the recognition of reality.

Yet, 'God', omnipotence and magic also carry the implication of organization, the ultimante organization. The most fundamental concept of existence is denied, the 'primacy of structure', the fact that you can't have organization without structure to maintain that organization.

For there to be organization, there must be some physical 'thing' organized, even for the organization of ideas. the physical realities cannot be dismissed or otherwise made to be something other than what they are.

Another most obvious absurdity in the concept of an omnipotent 'God' is that, if 'God' has existed forever, in that there vas no creation for 'him', 'her' or 'it', why would such a being créate everything else in existence at some point in time, somewhere in the midst of eternity?

Most religions claim this creation occured just a few thousand years ago. that this god should 'create' everythin at any point in eternity constitutes an absurdity. If 'God'  has existed forever, how is it that creation occurred only four thousand years ago or a few million years ago or twenty billion years ago? Any point in time you choose for creation will remain an absurdity, assuming an eternal 'God'.

These, then, are the primacy absurdities inherent in the concept of 'God'. the list is limited only by the amount of time one cares to devote pondering the implications. Everything we have learnes abut the universo indicates that things really woks in ways that are mutually exclusive with the concept of 'god'. Regardless of the direction one approaches the 'God'.

Belief can never ultimately Foster integrity or human functionality, simply because it is incompatible with intelectual integrit, it is founded on delusion. In order for such religión to survive, it must forever be at odds with the ultimate realities and instill defective thought patterns in its minions.



A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Religión is the foremost repository and teacher of organized untruth. Its teachings provide a foundation for most, if not all, psychological and social pathology. This cannot be stressed too strongly. Religious teachings, distorting one's perception of existence, permeate virtually all sociaties, generating every belief. The reasoning patterns and activities of religionists is an área where the effects of belief clearly stand out.

Religion's main line of defense is the ignorance the individual maintains in order to keep the faith, being unable to recognize the absurdities and failing to questions the teachings. Indeed, religion's greatest asset is the popular belief that relifion is a 'good' and that to question constitutes committing a 'sin'. The language of religión is couched in phrases dripping with sacrosanctity and reverence. We have been carefully taught.

Within a predominantly rational society, religious teachings would be recognized as fallacious, they would be analyzed in terms of their real effects. They would be exposed for what they are and the religions brought to task for foisting falsehoods upon the public. They would be attacked, just as we would attack any other social pathology. We do not accept poisons, drugs or even tobacco to be in the hands of our children, yet we deliberately destroy their minds with conceptual poison, fantasy and delusion that destroys their ability to reason, implanting learning disabilities that few will ever overcome.

We do not permit dangerous materials to be in the market place wothout warning labels, yet we eagerly expose ourselves to the delusions of religión, In terms of the over-all dementing effect religión has on any society, by comparison, its cumulative effects are far more detrimental tan alcohol and drugs combined. Without religión and the authoritarian oppression it spawns and supports, popular rationality levels would probably be high enough that drugs and alcohol would be minor problems or no problema at all.

 

IMPLICATIONS

 

In as much as the individual cognizance is the predominant determinant of human behavior, there are some important yet simple implications of the belief system which you should undestand regardless of your station in life.

First, an individual with serious belief system pathology will have serious áreas of irrationality. Such an individual will also be deficient in factual knowledge in reciprocal áreas of his or her beliefs.

Such an individual may try to fake rationality but can succeed anly a superficial level, lacking a necessary understanding of relationships, principals and insighits for broad-range rational behavior. Low or narrow-spectrum know high levels of belief system pathology.

SCH individuals tend to be like a 'ticking bomb'. They will be highly reactive to information that threatens their beliefs. They will be in a constant state of denial and will constantly struggle withthe problems of maintaining the beliefs. This will call for great energy to be used in avoiding information and in controlling emotionality and behavior. there will also be a serious nedd to insulate themselves within their own groups.

Conversely, broad factual knowledge and a good understanding of basic physical pronciples constitute a reliable indicator of a healthy cognitive system and of ratioanlity. A clue to objectively rationality is an ability to discuss any topic área without reactive emotionality.

Remember that an individual can be rational in most áreas yet be completely psychotic in a narrow range of cognizance, such as religious belief. One does not usually find such insulation around the pathology, however. More often a serious belief pathology will tend to generalize to other áreas, distorting a large part of the personality, and affecting a wide range of behavior, also, as we see in relifious belief.

Cognizance, ultimately perception, is the great determinant of human behavior. More tan any other factor, it will determine one's activities. Belief, shaping that cognizance, supports and drives the misderection of individuals and our institutions. Belief systems are insulated to the degree that the institutions of every society have made them taboo. The time has come, however, when Homo Sapiens must become self-correcting species or degenerate, laying waste the Earth environment in the process. That self-correction cannot be achieved without a species-wide assessment and correction of cognitive systems by individuals. No cause, no course of action, has approached the importance of this in human history. It will ultimately determine the continued evolution or devolution of intelligent life on Earth.

 

PSYCHIATRY

 

Any institution will have pockets of pathology. The same holds true for our academic disciplines. Psychology is severely limited and damaged by defective systems of thoutght. Most porminent among these is Freudian Psycology, its stronghold is Psychiatry. Although I object to nearly all Freudian psychology on the basis that it fails to recognize the real nature of funcional mental illness, it has become the defacto guardian of mental health and its use, to some degree, is inescapable.

In this role as the bróker of mental health, its accommodation of mental pathology and its unrealistic labeling of symptoms, conditions and processes, particularly its 'diseasing' of the human species by defining new categories of behavior which are labeled as a disease, have seriously retarded progress in the field of psychology, (analogous to Relativity in the field pf physics) and functions as a barrier to correction.

In this role as the accepted authority in mental health, and relevant to the 'diseasing' mentioned above, 'creating disease' by definition, increasingly brings more human behavior under its authority, supporting and increasing the caretaker mentality of officialdom.

Psychiatry has become one of our most powerful institutions, having been given oficial sanction as the carectaker of mental health, a position not limited to this socienty, but which it has achieved throughout a large part of the world. The real irony is that Psychiatry, per se, is the least equipped to be effective in this role, just as religión is the least equipped to be the source or bróker of morality.

Many trained in this discipline have come to recognoze its failings and, although still categorized as Psychiatrists, have migrated to alternative concepts and approaches.

For all its widespread  acceptance, Psychiatry is virtually useless in the alleviation of mental illness and, to the contrary, compounds problems through the wasting of resources, the negative effects of encouraging dependency and its propensity toward the maintenance of delusions, both within its own ranks and among those subjected to it. In mos mental institutions, attempts at rehabilitation are being increasingly abandoned in favor of controlling behavior through chemistry.

True rehabilitation requires reprogramming, new knowledge and the dissolving of beliefs, In other words, mental health can be restored only to the degree that beliefs can be disolved and the reciprocal factual knowledge fills the gaps. In addiction, the patient or subject will also need supplemental information to compensate for generalized ignorance,  resulting from avidance drive reaction to factual information and an absence of recognizing relationships among diverse information.

Although Grandfather Freud is to be commended for his effforts in lifting mental illness out of the clutches of religious superstition in Nineteenth Century Insane Asylums, with torture at the hands of ignorant and superstitions asylum caretakers trying to drive out the demons, his work is of Little value. In short, it doesn't work.

Interestingly, there has been more written with a Freudian slant or underpinnings tan any other form of psychology, literally enough to fill libraries, all of in virtually useless. Well, why not? It provides a safe haven for practically all of our fantasies, it provides a safe haven for practically all of our fantasies, it provides the illusion of doing somethig about our problems and its failures can e routinely projected onto the patient. Notice any resemblance to religión?

 

THE BELIEF/IGNORANCE SYNDROME

 

There is a difference between a working premise and a belief. Both are comprised of internalized congitive material, having the power to motivate the individual and influence behavior, but here the similarity ends.

A working premise is recognized as a temporary basis for activity and, as such, there is Little resistance to it being modified or replaced as more information is acquired. A belief is seen as an ultimate answer to some question, with no exprectation of modification or replacement. It becomes a foundation Stone, as it were, supporting a host of other ideas. Vested interest in a belief can become magnitudes greater than that for a working premise.

Support for a belief is a fabrication process since a belief can never be supported by real evidence. If a elief is supportable by real evidence, it is not a belief but knowledge. Further, any supporting materal for a belief is, itself, devoid of any real support. Maintenance of the belief, or any such supportive material, requires additional false material and an absence of relevant knowledge.

Protecting a belief is an exclusion process, as well as a fabrication process. The RCE mechanism, which protects the cognitive structure, and which any defense mechanism is a manifestation of, will be reactive in direct proportion to vested interest.

A close examination of these mechanisms and processes revelas belief to have implications far beyond the concept of merely holding an idea or systems of ideas. It is a complex síndrome which blocks Access to factual information motivating the individual to accept additional delusion in support of exiting belief. A belief is not merely an idea, it generates a belief/ignorance síndrome.

 

THE BELIEF/IGNORANCE BARRIER

 

Any emerging intelligent life form will generate the Belief/Ignorance síndrome as it gains in awareness of it's environment. To long endure, intelligent life must successfully breach this barrier and move beyond, recognizing the delusions for what they are and losing them. Otherwise, the species will destroy its environment and precipitate a premature degeneration, which would entail mass extinctions of other life forms as the parasitical species ravages its own environment.

The Belief/Ignorance síndrome becomes not only a critical barrier, but a lethal threat, when a species achieves technology, gaining significant control over disease and enhanced facility in the tapping and utilization of natural resources. These advancements encourage higher population levels and hasten the destruction of the environment. The belief/ignorance síndrome renders the group, and ultimately the species, incapable of making fundamental corrections, required for the sustainnability of the species.

As population growth rates sharply increase (thanks to the technology), resource usage increases, popullation and waste levels rise faster than they can be degraded. At our presents stage of species development, , technological and scientific facility has been achieved while population, high levels of belief resulting in ignorance and suppressed reasoning, preventing the correction of defective social structures.

As population densities increase and the environment's carrying capacity is progressively destroyed, the species is confronted with the problema of quickly shedding its cultural myths and sperstitions within a rapidly shrinking time frame. Without populations largely oriented to reality, the means to progress further will be destroyed.

 



The Power of Belief

The power of deeply-held and deeply-vested belief is awesome. if a belief is bolstered with an organized system of supporting fabricated material or if a belief is important to one's feeling of security, the mind will do whatever is necessary to maintain the belief, hallucinating, if necessary. Belief can lift one to heroics or cause one to destroy oneself.

The phenomenon of distorted mental function is perhaps most clearly displayed in the personality of the 'true believer'. Belief is a large component in the mind of any individual deeply immersed in religión and is most noticeabe in the resultant irrationalities and avoidance of infirmation by these individuals. We see it in terms of the mindless and often hysterical expressions of their faith, their intolerance of other beliefs, and in their desperate struggles to maintain these beliefs in a real world which offers evidence only to the contrary.

To maintain religious faith, vast amounts of information must be avoided, misinterpreted or distorted and any argument to support the belief must be seized upon, even though the argument will have been shown to be invalid. There is no exclusive with keeping the faith. As has been covered elsewhere, this cumulative avoidance of afactual knowledge has devastating effects upon the individual and upon any culture.

The true believer characteristically will also try to impose their own irrationalities upon others. The believer lives in a world of opinion. Lacking objective referents, there is a desperate need for confirmation of their beliefs from others.

Individual delusions translate to group behavior, the institutions insuring popular indoctrination, maintaining dysfunctional síndromes. We can measure it in the political thrust of the religions 'Right', the mindlessness of religious bumper stickers, the heavy religious hand on school textbook selection committees and the mindless mobs that gather at abortion clinics.

You can see it in the laws of the land in terms of codes, statutes and reglations designed to impose a particular morality through prohibition of both behavior and commodities. You can see it in an almost universal approach to governing, that of athoritarianism, modeled on the god concept, where control is arbitrarily imposed, mindless of rationality, feasibility, or costs in terms of negative effects. Under authoritarianism, the natural autonomy of the individual is usurped and natural autonomous controls are alrgely suppressed, not allowed to develop or function.

Belief is the predomínate menas of social control and manipulation. It is also the foremost pathogen of humanity. The harmful effects of belief can be measured through comparative tests designed to measure inductive reasoning aberrations, levels of real (factual) knowledge, individual reactance to belief-threatening information and distorted perception. More palpably, it can be measured by the destructive systems and activities, shaped and maintained by governments.

Culture Based Systems vs Nature Based Systems

Below the development of a highly evolved brain and the emergence of thought and reasoning, all development is purely mechanistic. Entities move independently to merge into systems, or respond to their environments, exhibiting natural drives toward continuance, effectiveness being nature's determinant, the ineffective dissolving to become part of something else. Until the development of a highly evolved brain, cognizance and reasoning can have no bearing on development. The emergence of the ability to manipulate one's environment conceptually, using conceptual and physical symbols, introduces reasoned behavior and planning.

Sincé many foundation concepts were gained early is the development of the human animal, having been instituted into human cultures and never corrected, they remain far adrift from factual reality. The por showing of human governing and social systems attests to their divergence from factual reality and natural systems.

In terms of social control there is no question that some formal government is necessary, but we cannot look to present systems as a source of leadership nor for solutions to problems. That is not the nature of authoritarian government.

Governing systems, at this stage in human development, are invariably authoritarian, controlling along the lines of religions and political agendas, belief, dogma and propaganda, the mechanisms of perception manipulation. Force is brought into play where resistance is encountered. this mode of social control suppresses mentality and resistance, and is limited to suppressing, individual drives and behavior, with attendant socially pathogenic consequiences.

In terms of instituted gobernment, an obvious and necessary first principle is thant it can never be a valid role of government to reduce the affectiveness of populations, nor otherwise involve itself in activity that destroys the functionality of individuals, societies or the species. The only valid role a government can possibly have, in the life of a species, is to serve its members in ways that are effective and enhance function toward survival and progress. This can never be achieved by popular opinión, political agendas or religious dogma.

Ultimately, the only valid role of government is as a tool of the individual, the only sorce of objective rationality, and the recognition of nature's principles. The survival of humanity as an intelligent life form depends upon a preponderance of popular orientation to factual reality. Government adrift from these objectives and natural principles will become self serving and destructive to the species through the decompensation of the individual.

Educating Toward Fantasy

Public education, in the United States, is an appendage of government. It educates in support of our cultural delusions, toward an orientation to Authority, belief, and allegiance to existing systems. It functions to indoctrinate toward the support and perpetuation of a culture's institutions. Public education serves to continue the delusion instilling processes began in the home. In general, it reinforces the delusions, which makes real learning a punishing activity, the teachers and administrators affected by the same delusions. The teaching of reasoning and the means of achieving valid determinations is avoided. Questions are kept endlessly open, in the absence of indicationg evidence or definitive determination. Most determinations are based on authority, not discovery by the student.

Public Education supports the cultural myths and fantasies and continues to reinforce these delusions. Public Education tends to squelch natural curiosity and the quiestioning of social dogma. It inevitably encourages irrational goals and instills biases toward the accommodation of our institutionalized and codified delusions and stupidities.

Public Educarion in the Unites States also reflects the abuses of unionism, becoming a self-serving system of process, not product. In this systems, decreasing education costs more. It is a system where teaching is endless process, where teachers pretend to teach and students pretend to learn, neither sensing the ultimate realities.

Public Education maintains approaches and premises that hinder reasoning, the student's ability to react to false teachings and the ability to discriminate and reach valid determinarions. It conditions by reinforcing false premise structures and reasoning patterns that provide only an imagined facility in dealing with problems. It recognizes no absolutes in exitence and teaches none, providing no enduring referents for the student, nor a sense of the ultimate realtionships, unity and harmony.

Its products is increasingly unfit for a technological society or for an effective democracy, which depends upon a predominately rational elecorate for its only source and drive toward self-correction.

Private educarion is lost in a similar miasma, instilling its own irrarional cultural perspectives, reflecting how completely cultural fantasies permeate and distort public perception.

The arts and sciences are also adulterates in the maintenance of mucho of the basic fantasy structure. The whole realm of the Arts is forever being used as an instrument for manipulating perception and selling the authoritarian agenda. Music, in terms of the thought content it conveys, is perhaps the most effective unwitting servant of irrationality. Artists and songwriters are among the least knowledgeable in terms of the underlying ature of problems or how things relate. They express their ignorance, superstitions and distorted reasoning level of delusion. The artista become the nwitting disseminators of misconception and irratioanality, often producing gold plated manure that is wothout value, or of negative value, in terms of its effects upon the public.

Science is encouraged to accommodate the cultural fantasies, necessitating groundless premises, limited reasoning patterns and the formulation of tautological premises are avoided, largely by the routine rejections of basic premises are avoided, largely by the routine rejection of new information originating from any source other tan institutional science. Although less affected by cultural delusion tan other áreas and cultural structures, science does not escape its influence, the are of physics now far afield in misdirection.

The mentally damaged masses enthusuastucally join in the process, propagating and proliferating public dementia. This virulent síndrome is self-generating and self-reinforcing. In all cases, the phatology, ultimately, has its roots in belief, the acceptance of cultural borne ideas in the absence of supporting evidence.

The dynamics of our social systems are easy to understand and easy to follow, once one recognizes the fundamental delusions. The difficulty lies in recognizing the enormity of their cumulative pathology and the devastating effects cultural delusion has on our mental processes and our approaches to problems. We have no untainted standard of comparison and have been taught to avoid comparisons that might lead to effective discrimination between fact and fantasy.

In other words, we are so immersed in cultural delusion that w view the whole sad, sick mess as something normal and inevitable.

Hidden within this fog of popular delusion, the real principles and requierements of social functionality remain, the carácter of which we have not been taught and to which our ignorance and false beliefs renders us virtually blind.

 

THE LIVING INSTITUTION

 

One natural factor contributing to problems and the proliferation of propagnada lies in the nature of cultural institutions, themselves. Any organized or institutionalized group takes on a life of its own. As a living system, it has the power and the propensity to perpetuate itself. The organized structure survives individual minions and exerts powerful forces upon the individual within the organization. It is no longer confined to the characteristics of those in immediate control and always has a propensity to serve its own systems, often to the detriment of the public.

Institutions become self-perpetuating, their offices and systems operated by a succession of temporary functionaries bent on embellishing their own short tenures and whose reasoning and behavior have been largely shaped by the organization.

Institutional bureaucracy generates massive amounts of inertia, its moves, relecting the consensus of committees and the routine of accepted procedures. In the process, its integrity and rationality becomes but a shadowy vestige of that of its individual functionaries.

The organization moves as something alive, having a drive of its own, to grow and expand its sphere of influence, imhampered by any intrinsic madate for objective rationality or integrity, in contrast to such as found in the individual.

To my knowledge, no cultural institution in today's world has adopted objective rationality as a constitutional mandate, yet such rationality is necessary if the organization is to function as a positive forcé within a society, not being in some way at odds with social functionality.

No existing organization is likely to have true rationality as an operational directive, if for no other reason than that no one seems to understand its roots and how to achieve it. Rationality and a truth or reality-reflecting ethos is generated only as traits of individuals. It is a function born of knowedge and intellectual integrity,  understanding the necessity of accepting reality, like it or not, recognizing the necessity for social facilitation among entities.

Such rationality, rare as it may be, can be found in provate operations. However, within any large organization, it is usually a pale reflection of its source. Significant amounts of rationality, above that necessary for effective operation, are usually limited to organizations outside the realm of government, often under the direction of one individual.

Private organizations tend to be more ethical than governmental because they have to hue to the realities of the marketplace. Governmental committees tend to have trouble with reality. Their motives lie elsewhere, such as maintaining the support of their constituents. They characteristically do not move significantly beyond this point.

Our Inevitable Dilemma

From the momento of birth, each of us are carefully taught a multiplicity of untrue material. The fact that fantasies permeate every aspect of our society insures this. The delusion is proffered or echoed by every institution.

None of us have completely escaped this fantasy environment, nor the pathology it generates. We were too Young when the proccess began and the fantasies have been too consiestent and all-pervasive. As individuals, the only remedy is to begin asserting Independence, to become cognizant of one's own delusions and replace them with knowledge. In a tolerante environment, this process tends to occur naturally, the voids being replaced with knowledge as the delusions drop away. the dropping of belief, in favor of reciprocal knowledge and understanding, provides a shield against the emotional hooks and controls of culture.

The teaching and reinforcement of false material will continue for as long as the institutions are allowed to disseminate it. Whe should count ourselves lucky if, in our lifetime, we are able to significantly reduce the amount of propaganda that pours over us. However, such material has its greatest effects upon the unwary. If we understand its nature, we largely neutraliza the detrimental effects.

People are great kidders. Unfortunately, the thing they are best at is kidding themselves. They live, to a large degree, in their own individual worlds of make-believe. They belong to no groups free of its own set of delusions, which are told and believed, embellished and passed on. The individual is bombarded with false material and distorted reasoning from the moment of birth and, by maturity, is left with Little recognition of, or capacity for, truth as protrayed by the real cosmos. The individual lives with lies and by lies, and is free of them only in death.

Few are able to differentiate between opinión and knowledge; between groundless theories and evidence-supported premises. They have not been taught to think critically and to question authority. They have had to repress critical reasoning in order to keep the faith. The typical individual, in any culture, has Little concern for truth, becoming cynical and grappling endelessly with his or her own beliefs,  distorting perception and reasoning in a continuing struggle to make the pieces fit. Few dare discriminate between knowing and believing. Those who cannot are maleable and vulnerable to the chaos of propaganda and opinión that is endlessly pured over them.