Guest Post by Geoff Olson
I visited with a distressed friend recently. “I feel I don’t know enough,” he said with a pained expression. “I want to understand fully what’s happening, but there’s so much out there to learn.”
My friend is a voracious reader and student of history. Being in communications, he’s always been about gathering jigsaw pieces from books, magazines and the Internet, to assemble a bigger picture. He knows enough to have a broad outline of how the world really works, from the local to national to global level, and that alone disturbs him. He’s both heartfelt and smart.
‘Smart’ is an interesting word. I’ve long found it interesting that it’s Germanic root references pain.
From Oxford Languages:
SMART
Old English smeortan (verb), of West Germanic origin; related to German schmerzen; the adjective is related to the verb, the original sense (late Old English) being ‘causing sharp pain’; from this arose ‘keen, brisk’, whence the current senses of ‘mentally sharp’ and ‘neat in a brisk, sharp style’.
Being smart can smart. Through the sideways association of pain, sharpness, and mental agility, the word seems like a capsule inversion of that fabled expression, ‘ignorance is bliss.’
“When I was a girl just setting out on my quest,” wrote the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich in her memoir Living With a Wild God, “I asked myself whether I would want to know the “truth” even if I was given the “foreknowledge that it would only be a bitter disillusionment.”
This possibility had been impressed on me at a very young age by a radio drama, long ago, when there were such things in America, with actors and scripts. Four mostly paralyzed veterans occupy a hospital room, where only one can see out the window. He whiles away the hours by describing the outside world to his roommates the comings and goings, the laughing children, the pretty girls-until one of the other men demands that he get a turn in the bed by the window. The switch is made. The new guy gets the window and discovers that what actually lies outside is nothing but a brick wall-no comings and goings, no laughter or sunshine. Would I want to know a truth like that? Courageously, or so I thought at the time, I decided that I would.
At some point in our lives my friend and I tacitly chose to pursue the same path Ehrenreich did, as have millions of others. And although it’s sometimes is difficult to understand why anyone would take a path in the opposite direction, it’s actually the easiest thing in the world to decode.
None of us wants to see a brick wall when the curtains are drawn back. That’s entirely natural and human. But some of us are willing to risk that possibility out of curiosity, a desire to know the truth, and sometimes even a sense of justice. That’s also entirely natural and human. The one impulse – to avoid pain – is aversive. The other impulse – to hazard it – is exploratory.
Without the latter, there never would have been Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks revelations or Aaron Kheriaty and others’ successful FOIA of Pfizer documents.
A god trapped in the stomach of a beast
“Most of us do our best,” writes the psychoanalyst Todd Hayen in the essay Ignorance is Bliss for OffGuardian:
The point I am making is that it is instinctual to focus on our position with regard to contentment and happiness in the current moment, where we do have at least a modicum of control. Since, as I said earlier, many of us (and probably everyone reading this) are privy to the real happenings in the world that will have profound effect on our “in the moment” life at some future point. We are sitting in the tension of awareness that any contentment and peace we now feel is fleeting. Reality will soon hit us hard—the other shoe will soon drop…
“We each have different nuanced reasons for engaging in this fight,” Hayen continues. “For some of us it is religious and spiritual, for others it concerns the world we are leaving behind for our children, and for others it is due to our intense belief in freedom, character, and fundamental values as a human being.”
Back to my distressed friend. I asked him this: even if you were able on a superhuman level able to absorb enough accurate knowledge to give a complete, crystal clear accounting of the world and its workings, how would you get it to the ones who need to see it the most? And would they follow it openly but critically, all the way through? And assuming they’re convinced, would they act on the information?
(As most of the readers here know, it’s dispiriting trying to communicate with people whose reflexive position is ‘don’t show me that,’ or ‘don’t tell me that.’ Or who squawk ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation,’ parroting a mass media they were suspicious and skeptical of only a few short years ago. Most of us have given up on trying.)
I wasn’t trying to discourage my friend about digging for the truth, I was trying to encourage him about human limitations. It’s impossible for any of us to have an omniscient view of the world and its workings, and we all have our cognitive biases hacking away in the background like neural gremlins. “Someone today with true understanding would be like a god,” Nietzsche wrote back in the 19th century, “but a god trapped in the stomach of a beast.”
The last human being said to have an expansive understanding of the world, with a good grasp of multiple, unrelated disciplines – the last real “Renaissance person” – is said to be the writer Aldous Huxley. He wrote essays on everything from medieval painting to psychopharmacology, and though he died over a half century ago, in his fiction and nonfiction he prophecized the biotechnocratic fascism now at our doorstep.
Huxley was an amazing thinker. But the important point here is that he wasn’t a lettered expert in science, medicine, history, political science, or art. He was a generalist. And although knowledge has increased exponentially since his death, and we won’t likely see anyone able to range quite as widely as Huxley again, we still need the generalists like my smarting friend every bit as much as we need the specialists (once defined by some wag as “someone who knows more and more about less and less”).
Recent generalists that come to mind are James Corbett, Whitney Webb, and even media fixtures like Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, whose talent as generalists is to showcase specialists in a compelling and entertaining manner.
Listening Sufi Style
The American writer Robert Anton Wilson – another brilliant generalist – once had an audience engage in a Sufi listening exercise. He gave out pens and notepads, and asked everyone to sit in silence and listen intently, writing down all the different sounds they could hear (distant traffic outside the auditorium, creaking chairs, fabric rustling as people shifted in their seats, etc.).
When Wilson asked for a show of hands, he found the most sounds heard by any single person came to almost two dozen. Then he asked the audience if anyone had heard anything this fellow had not. Hands shot up, and Wilson added the noted sounds to the list, for a total of over forty. This upshot? This proved, he said, that even the most observant person in the room was aware of only about half of what was really going on.
Wilson demonstrated how awareness is a collective effort. We have to keep paying attention with full consciousness to the moment, not just for ourselves, the red-pilled, but for the blue-pilled, the ones with their hands to their ears. Because hands are dropping. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observed, our numbers are growing, but theirs are not.
Most of us struggle to understand, to know, even though the big picture is discouragingly immense in scope, and cognitive biases colour our interpretations. Yet as Einstein once observed, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” The transhumanists and their backers are hammering together a vast, open-air Skinner box for us all, and it will take great imagination to think – and act – outside of it.
Hubris and overreach
Yes, it looks very dark, but it looked very dark in the last century, too. In the 1940s, millions of Europeans genuinely feared their democratic civilization was coming to an end. And it very likely would have, had not Hitler made the insane decision to invade the Soviet Union. And this is very often the way that authoritarian regimes collapse – through hubris and overreach.
One of Einstein’s contemporaries, Charlie Chaplin, released one of his most memorable films in that dark hour. In the final speech from the 1940 film The Great Dictator, the reluctant leader confesses:
We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…
There’s an echo in Chaplin’s words in the more recent quote below from Alex Krainer. I believe this the best piece of advice to convey to my smarting friend and the curious reader.
Do not allow yourself to be discouraged by fear and despair that the media shovels our way 24/7. We are witnessing the manifestations of old systems collapsing. And while some of those manifestations appear fearsome, do keep in mind Confucius‘ counsel:
“A seed grows with no sound. But a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence…grow silently.”
Destruction is all around us, creating great noise, but you carry a seed that grows silently within. Be mindful of it and shield it from anxiety as you would shield your child. Things that emerge from seeds are worthy of our reverence. If we cultivate them with attention and love, they can grow beautiful and majestic.
As Dostoevsky said, beauty will save the world. That beauty is us – you and I – our children, our parents, our friends, all of us. We can’t see what all these seeds will become, but it should be easy to believe – nature’s creations are always so beautiful. And be sure to turn your love inward as well as outward.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
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stopped at “there never would have been Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring”
Yeah, the 30+ million killed by Malaria over the years, entirely avoidable and only due to complete stop of DDT use, is surely laudable -not to mention the even higher number of maimed.
Especially when you learn that Malaria had been eradicated in US Southern states, in the early 1960’s using DDT. (And how many people died there, from poisonous effects of DDT! /s)
It’s too bad you stopped, because the best part of the article is at the end.
exactly my thought as well, Svarga.
Thought is was a profound article.
Beyond Silent Spring: An Alternate History of DDT
As historian Elena Conis pursued a clearer understanding of one of the world’s most infamous chemicals, she discovered why our histories often conflict with the facts.
By Elena Conis | February 14, 2017
At the tail end of World War II, Irma Materi left Seattle for Korea to join her husband, Joe, an army colonel. The couple and their new baby moved into a white stucco house with a red tile roof—and scores of nooks and crannies for insects to hide in. Fortunately, Materi had packed just the thing to address the problem: a grenade-shaped canister containing the new insecticide DDT, which she sprayed on high shelves, in dark corners, and under furniture and cabinets.
A few days later the Materis received a visit from the army’s DDT detail: a lieutenant and a dozen men wearing white jumpsuits with large spray packs strapped to their backs. As Materi scrambled to carry the family’s clothes, linens, utensils, and food to safety, the team doused the home with a solution of kerosene and DDT. Materi later wrote about the experience:
We stood on the slippery floors and watched the kerosene dripping from the light fixtures. “It would be a good idea not to let the baby touch anything with DDT on it,” suggested the Lieutenant—and made his exit while I was still contemplating how my Korean vase with the four-toed dragon would look adorning the back of his head.
[Article break]
In wartime DDT had saved lives, and it had done so by inflicting easily accepted collateral damage. In peacetime, however, DDT’s negative effects on beneficial insects, birds, and fish warranted renewed consideration. National Geographic merely alluded to this; others were more direct. When the War Production Board first released DDT for sale to the public, it cautioned against “use of it to upset the balance of nature” and added that if applied to crops, DDT would leave residues that might also cause harm to humans.
What kind of harm? The problem was that no one really knew. Testing at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had shown that in lab animals DDT could cause tremors, liver damage, and death. Of the variety of animals tested in 1943 and 1944, monkeys seemed most resistant to DDT’s effects, mice the least. DDT suspended in oil proved more toxic than DDT dust, and the liquids DDT was dissolved in (like kerosene) often seemed more toxic than DDT itself. What was worrisome, according to FDA pharmacologist Herbert O. Calvery, was that the amount of DDT it took to produce symptoms of toxicity had no clear correlation across species; in some species it took very little, while in others it took a lot. The problem was complicated even further by the fact that when small animals ate small amounts of DDT over time, they developed poisoning symptoms normally associated with a single, large dose. Calvery concluded that although it was extremely difficult to say just how much DDT was safe for animals or humans to ingest, the safe “chronic”—or ongoing—level of DDT exposure “would be very low indeed.”
Source:
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/beyond-silent-spring-an-alternate-history-of-ddt
__________
“A seed grows with no sound. But a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence…grow silently.”
Nice!
Bla, bla, bla.
So how many people have died from DDT poisoning, be it in Korea or the US Southern states?
Oh, ok, in the full article [you linked to] the author very carefully stalks into a “maybe it’s not all bad” about DDT. And she is even able to draw a certain assumption, that the Zika fight in the US [in 2016] might have been done using DDT. (My suspicion is they used a tiny bit different chemical agent that has mostly the same characteristics as DDT, if such a thing exists; so they could state they didn’t use DDT.)
full article [you linked to] the author very carefully stalks into a “maybe it’s not all bad”
Perhaps this:
“Fraud in science is a major problem.” So begins “DDT: A Case Study in Scientific Fraud” by the late J. Gordon Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Entomology at San Jose State University in San Jose, California.
The article was published shortly after his death last July in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Fall, 2004. It is based in part on his 34-page manuscript discussing fraud in acid rain, ozone holes, ultraviolet radiation, carbon dioxide, global warming, and pesticides, particularly DDT.
His publications distinguish Edwards as the leading authority on the environmental science and politics of DDT.
In World War I, prior to the discovery of the insecticidal potential of DDT, typhus killed more servicemen than bullets. In World War II, typhus was no problem. The world has marveled at the effectiveness of DDT in fighting malaria, yellow fever, dengue, sleeping sickness, plague, encephalitis, West Nile Virus, and other diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, fleas, and lice.
Today, the greatest killer and disabler is malaria*, which kills a person every 30 seconds. By the 1960s, DDT had brought malaria near to extinction. “To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable,” said the National Academy of Sciences.
Source:
_____________
PS: Some people think eating DDT is ok.
I am not one of them.
_____________
*I disagree. I think, the biggest killer is human behavior.
Thank you, hadn’t heard of him.
I even came to the conclusion myself, after reading this https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/04mala.html and realizing the author carefully avoided the most obvious conclusion:
Maybe we need to reconsider/re-measure the true toxicity of DDT, and allow at least very specific uses in low dosages.
And only a year or two later did I stumble across a US government website which described that DDT eradicated Malaria in US Southern states – I had never heard before that it even once existed there. That was then the cherry on top of that NYT article.
A beautiful conclusion to words of encouragement. Let’s all remember our fellow warriors in the coming years. We are not alone.
Let’s begin by stating the obvious; there is far more to be grateful for in life than to regret. Life is, after all, a myriad of sublime experiences, filled with ineffable and transcendant beauty beyond our capacity to fully appreciate. There is more good than bad, more that uplifts than drags us down, and far more supply than any desired need.
Our greatest fault as a species is our choice of perspective. A brisk stroll through a burgeoning forest on a Spring morning in full Sun with a mild breeze can be instantly derailed by a pebble in a shoe. Forgetting all the wonderous sights and sensations, the fact that we are alive and healthy, that we even have shoes to protect our feet is supressed to focus on our minor discomfort.
That’s the world we inhabit. We focus on all the wrong things and overlook the multitudes of gifts and blessings bestowed upon us simply for existing.
These choices we make, every second, every hour, every day define our life and our place in the Universe.
Choose wisely.
And Happy Easter.
When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
– Marcus Aurelius
Looking through rose colored glasses is self deception.
War, hunger, poverty, homelesness, disease, “natural disasters”, etc, etc. That’s been our history. Evil and suffering everywhere. A world ruled by psychopaths. That’s reality!
You’re born here in order to be a slave for the system and reproduce, to bring a new generation of slaves to the farm. Period. After that you are trashed. Lather, rinse, repeat forvever. Everything else is just a distraction.
Sucks to be you.
Thank you for proving the point.
We’ve each been given the life we’ve earned — it’s called karma …
So we must deal with it smilingly or else risk coming back again to, hopefully, get it right …
You’re born here in order to be a slave for the system and reproduce, to bring a new generation of slaves to the farm.
Get back to work slave!
Yes. Well stated Marc.
In a phrase…it’s where we choose to focus and dwell.
Lefty ecofascists, despite their SJW blather, prefer birds to humans. They argument could be made that lefty whites’ banning of DDT for mosquito eradication is racist against the majority of malaria victims.
Ecclesiastes 1:18 KJB… “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
Wrote Solomon. God had yet to reveal His manifold wisdom to Paul!
Galatians 6:14 KJB… “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”
The more you know the worse it is has been on my mind recently, this article was something i needed to see, thank you admin.
“The insane decision by Hitler to invade the Soviet Union.” Hitler beat Stalin to the punch. Viktor Suvorov was given access to the Soviet archives and wrote the book “Icebreaker” that revealed Stalin was a month away from invading Germany. And “their democratic civilization coming to an end”? Ask Eastern Europe about that post-1945.
A Modest Proposal
It is apparent that the American republic is facing a moment of truth. The centrifugal force of our citizens fundamental differences is making current political arrangements both unstable and unsustainable. While ideologues may want to fight we should instead look for opportunities to restructure our republic to preserve the overwhelming good while at the same time addressing the grievances, legitimate and illegitimate, of all citizens.
We have to recognize that most citizens are detached and disinterested whether because of apathy or sloth. Human nature has always been an obstacle for those seeking reform. It was the case when the United States declared its independence and it is the case now that we must fundamentally reform the federal, state and local governments. This undertaking is monumental and will require a collective leadership focused on transitioning the failing centralized federal government to a decentralized federation. It’s that or the country will disintegrate. While most Americans have no interest in doing the complex, hard work this would entail they do care about and will have to consent to the outcome. That’s just the way the world works.
The United States has been here before. After becoming independent the new states ratified the Articles of Confederation which basically codified the work of the proto-federal government, the Continental Congress. The result was a federal government too weak to govern effectively. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was convened to address this crisis and the Constitution and Bill of Rights became the solution. In a similar vein, the federal government has become too powerful and needs to be restructured into a less powerful, narrowly focused entity. Substantially less powerful with most of the power to govern devolved back to the states where it rightfully belongs. This is much easier said than done.
The first step is to recognize there are no winners at the end of the current road we are on. We all lose. Strongly held moral, ethical and traditionally held values and beliefs will never be negotiable. Any meaningful discussion has boundaries, hard limits for both sides. So any restructuring must achieve a clear understanding, a circumscribed compromise, that specifically defines what is broken that should be reformed and what is good that should be preserved. Compromise. A word despised by radicals on both sides of the current political divide but a place all roads eventually lead to.
The good news is our history and successful federalism, for example in Switzerland, provide both a starting point and practical waypoints on the road map to implementation. So Americans need to get a grip, get real and work towards a solution instead of just arguing and complaining which fixes nothing. We have much more in common than we are willing to admit and this will become apparent as the dialog progresses. Our objective should be to convert the prison we all think we’re in (which really isn’t the case but that seems to be the impression people have) to a condominium. Narrowly defined and universally accepted federal government duties always subordinate to the rights of citizens and the states they inhabit.
It can be done because it must be done.