Where to begin - Part I here
An introduction to dishonesty - here

Having outlined this mechanism of dishonesty and shown how easy it is to slip in to it, we need to take a broad look at where we are situated. If we can be dishonest about something that simple then we do have to ask questions about whether our entire world-view is founded on honesty. What we often find is that it is based on our second mechanism of dishonesty which is this. 

2. Reasoning about an unvalidated assumption using another unvalidated assumption as the basis for the inference.

To illustrate this by analogy it is like arguing about the contents of a box, which you have never looked inside, and then using this assumption as the basis for your argument. 

I accept that a fair enquirer such as yourself may think I am being unnecessarily patronising in saying this, but I have to mention it since it was one of the most common aspects of dishonesty we used to come across in the TS days. 

An example of such an argument is: 'There is a self because I can think when I want to'. 

This kind of argument is derived from not looking in to and investigating the aspects of free will regarding our thinking. Then, it is a simple matter of using this reasoning to assert a self which has, hitherto, never been observed. 
In both sides of this proposition a fallacy has been committed but it is not so much that I can or should convince someone the self doesn't exist. However, if they were to look inside the box, so to speak, and examine their free will regarding thinking then maybe they would see this was questionable. Then they might look in to the self after seeing this assumption was untrue.

This kind of investigation is all I can ever hope to achieve in writing any piece here. I cannot convince you about the self, but hopefully I can convince you to look inside the box (and see if the cat is dead or alive Schrödinger! :).

To most people the fact I have mentioned this might seem absurd but the simple fact of the matter is that is scarily common. The depths of your brains deceit will shock you when you start investigating - I can promise you that much. I should also jog your memory that our first pattern was 'resting on prior assumptions without testing their validity' - We are simply dealing with an extension of the first pattern. 

This pattern is so common because we have had a lifetime of learning about the world, social conventions, learning coping skills, observing others, making our own mistakes, and of course being exposed to our education system. I think in one sense that it could be labelled as an 'indoctrination system'. 

The reason for this is that we are spoon fed an ideology from a young age and this shapes the way we grow up and the thoughts we form about the world. 

For instance, if we compared a Nazi ideology to our own, we would find it somewhat abhorrent that school kids were taught they were superior to all other beings and that these others were 'untermensch'. 

In our own education system we were relentlessly hammered with a more tolerant ideology of others, which I think makes for a better society, but the fact remains that it is still ideological. 

Naturally, if we could cram the best knowledge of the best historical tried and tested ideas and principles in to a training program, it makes sense we have an education system. 
This is not without its own set of problems and the way in which the education system was implemented was rightly criticised by Schopenhauer back in the 1800s and has never actually been addressed even to this day. 

He made the simple observation that our knowledge  in education arises from books and lectures, and rarely from experience. If you think back to the evidence based learning you did at school, maybe you will remember your science classes with fond memories. However, when you think about it you would concede that the majority of your studies were simply taken on faith that the teacher was a legitimate authority in possession of the facts. 

What leads us to think that these facts we learn are legitimate is that disciplines such as mathematics and the English language are consistent and internally coherent. In these fields there is certainly little in the way of contradiction until we start learning more English words, especially those with two meanings, or getting in to 'Godels incompleteness theorem' with mathematics for example.

Disciplines such as history (my favourite subject at school) paved the way for our critical thinking faculties and taught us to question versions of events. However, I later learned that we are taught a certain version of history in English schools and it was only when I went travelling and met others from Europe and wider, I realised the horrors that we had inflicted upon the world in our imperial days. 

To say we are taught a skewed version of history was an understatement. In Irish schools they teach a more in depth account of the potato famine and the vile horrors that the English inflicted upon starving masses. At our school though it was merely acknowledged that this happened and the atrocities were simply ignored. 
This certainly did not interfere with general consensus that we won many wars, were victorious in colonising the largest empire the world had seen, single handedly kick started the industrial revolution, and paved the way for the modern world. 

The fact of the matter is that in many ways our knowledge is given to us in the form of concepts and these are learned from books and lectures. I am sure you will also agree that since you left school a fair proportion of the information we derive from TV documentaries, other people, and the like, is 'reported knowledge' rather than derived from your experience. 

A clear example of this is regarding outer space. Whilst you may have observed a blurred distant dot that was allegedly the moon through a telescope that shook all over the place as a  youngster, much of our knowledge here is purely conceptual. Yet we know a fair amount about the solar system without ever actually going in to outer space. 

Cheeeeese Gromit?!

We take it on faith that the moon is not made from cheese but we have never bothered going there to look!

Whilst there is nothing wrong with reported knowledge and you can apply this to your own life usefully and critically reflect on it, it points to the fact that Schopenhauer's observation rings true. Whilst we may have had some practical lessons and even questioned some of the concepts we learn, I'm sure you will not be inclined to disagree with me when I say that much of our knowledge is second hand. 

Much more of our knowledge than we previously recognised is not actually derived from discovering it for ourselves experientially, it is conceptually taken on faith from a trusted authority.

We take a lot of things on faith  from authority and it would be plainly be absurd for me to try and suggest that this is a bad idea. Conversely, there are many things we have learned from our experience too, namely social skills, coping skills and using tools, driving cars etc. 
It makes sense that we are indoctrinated with a code of how to behave towards each other and are packed full of the most up to date concepts ready to take out in to the adult world. There is nothing wrong with this but we simply have to recognise that not all of the 'facts' we have learned are necessarily true. 

Whilst much of our knowledge is consistent, we merely have to open ourselves up to the possibility that some of it may not be true.

If we take the self as an example, I think you will find that you were never taught anything about it. Your  earlier existence entailed that 'you' were responsible for your actions and that you felt shame and humiliation when you were scolded by teachers and parents. Later you learned that all thinking is in a relational capacity to ones self, in relation to others, material needs, goals etc.

The fact of the matter is you were never explicitly taught any of this stuff, and if you ever did question it it was when you first encountered a philosophy class or came across someone else's viewpoint. It is simply a prosaic observation that this account is the way we view the world as 'selves' without ever having ever made it explicit. We simply assume our existence without ever working it out logically and our experience reinforces this notion of our being subjects in the world.

All we have to do really is start to investigate this area thoroughly  and check out whether our assumptions were true. 

When it comes to the bigger questions like why are we here? Or what is the meaning of life? We are told not to worry about such things and our philosophical inclinations are curtailed from a young age. I was lucky enough to rediscover them with a sense of vigour back when I investigated this no self malarkey.  

Your curiosity cannot be buried forever. That nagging doubt you feel about your place in the world, and what it all means, arises from starting out with a distorted view of the world. This view is based purely on the groundless assumptions our brain made about us being some kind of entity having the experience of the world, that we took as a given without ever questioning this notion. 

A Given Framework Of Thinking

With limited information our brain fills in the blanks and makes assumptions necessary to fit the framework of facts we are presented with. We are hammered relentlessly by advertisers who play on our primordial fears of being ostracised by our peer group, or try to associate the most mundane and banal items with positive images of fun. Take any advert and look at the images it portrays. Then  take the item itself independently from the advert and see if it excites you quite so much. It's just a fucking ice cream right?! 

You get people in offices sat there all day trying to associate unconnected things like 'healthy lifestyle' with chemically laden food. This pattern is actually played out to us on the receiving end relentlessly. It is not so much that we take these things as truth, it merely reinforces the view that we are deficient in some way, or of some need, and that these products can fill this void in your life.

Some of the adverts try to elicit us in to feeling an emotional connection to the protagonist. The fact of the matter remains is that it actually works. If it didn't, then why would it be a multi million business? 

I would like to say it doesn't work on me as such but when I find myself having to shop around for insurance, what are the first places that spring to my mind? Confused.com, Go Compare etc (In the UK). If I am honest, I am a sucker like the rest of the masses despite not wanting to be. 
I am already familiar with these companies and the way they arise in my mind when I want insurance is because when I listen to the radio they are there, when I watch TV they are there. You could literally spend a whole day and have one of their adverts appear every 15 – 20 minutes drumming in to your brain. 

I tend to stay away from TV and read books instead, and I also try to avoid listening to local radio, so I am not subjected to the relentless advertising which I have come to despise. I also have ad blockers on my web browser and I delete marketing messages without reading them. 
The thing to note is that even though we may try and insulate ourselves from this relentless stream of BS, it still has an effect on us because we absorb the things around us that either grab our attention, or pass us by unaware. 

It is impossible for your mind not be polluted with these cultural artefacts.

The fact that confused.com and go compare spring to mind is not because  you have the remotest interest in insurance products, it is their aggressive advertising practices which means you can't help that they spring to mind when you have the ball ache of hunting for a cheaper insurance renewal.

More alarming is the active influence in society which emanates from the news and print media. When we engage with any form of media we are being deliberately led to think in a certain manner and their goal is to convince us that their account is correct. If we think about communication in its most basic form we use it to influence people. 

Even if we are telling the time or talking about the weather, we are in some way attempting to influence another person to believe the facts we may be in possession of.

Politically speaking, matters are far far worse than we may think. What we have is not a debate in this country, but parameters to contain any real debate. Mention Karl Marx and be ready for some opinion editorial piece , by someone who never read a single page of Marx's work, to tell you what a wretched political system he advocated. 

Whilst Mr Marx's positive thesis has been laid to waste and has been a proven failure in practice, his criticisms of the capitalist system are poignant and as valid as ever. However, these howling contradictions he highlighted within this system are generally ignored. 

We might ask how is it that we can ignore such howling contradictions that render the capitalist system as broken? The way in which in this done is by the media repeatedly portraying Marxism as a failed system and by extension we  simply assume that he never had any good insights about the current system that organises society at large, since these are never mentioned anywhere. 

By framing Marx as a villain they propagate the ad hominem fallacy by trying to slur his character and make it sound as though he had nothing valuable to say.

It should be no surprise that it is the wealth accumulating to the top 1% and various other things that the power elite want to maintain. Their vested interest is in maintaining the status quo is in order to propagate the favourable arrangements that they and their cronies enjoy at the expense of the common man. 

It should not be too difficult for you to see that the majority of Britain's media is owned by the wealthy and they try to keep control of the parameters of the debate. 

As Noam Chomsky said: 
'The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum' (Chomsky, 1998).

The media in this country have pulled off a coup de tat. By silencing genuine and poignant criticisms of the capitalist systems they have effectively silenced this aspect of the debate. Where do we ever get to hear any meaningful debate these days? 
Rather than being presented with the arguments for each side, we have opinion pieces which aim to influence us by appealing to our emotions rather than present any kind of rational debate.

The reason for this is that we are apathetic to what is going on and most people don't want to hear about the debate. If we were to present the debate it would take up multiple pages and lets face it, most people are more inclined to read a few paragraphs that sum it up simply, and arouse their emotions, than engage in any real critical thinking.

This is because critical thinking and philosophy are boring to most people. 

Period. 

It is asking a lot for the layman to engage in any kind of debate that goes way over their heads. However, some of us are condemned to the compulsion of a life of picking away at orthodoxy and exploring the implications of our discoveries.

To say that capitalism is flawed is missing the bigger picture since there are definitely virtues of such a system. Communism is hardly going to solve the problem and has its own major flaws and contradictions. However, the way in which neo-liberal economic orthodoxy is failing us is in that the state is deregulating restraints on business and curtailing the liberties of its citizens. 

You need only read about the way our governments have been busted for spying on its citizens (viz. Snowden) yet allow companies like Amazon to avoid paying its fair share of tax. The fact of the matter is that corporate power has infiltrated our democracy. Economic priorities trump the very people whom the economic practice of capitalism is meant to serve. 

Keynes (1936) described it as 'The worm that had been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation... the over-valuation of the economic criterion'. Nearly one hundred years later we are still faced with the same problem and there has been little impetus for society to move on from this dead end of thinking (we are in a post modern crisis of capitalism).

Our priorities have been skewed by our indolence to the real debate we should be having and the fact of the matter is that economics are prioritised above human well being and that of the fragile planet upon which we live. To my mind the right / left split in politics is a false dichotomy that pits one aspect of human nature against the other. I am not the first to call for a new politics but what we have currently is broken in many ways. 

Whilst we have got sidetracked here, what we have shown is that what we see and hear is controlled in the sense that an orthodoxy is entrenched, and alternative views silenced. The internet is the greatest threat to this control of information so have the government responded to it?

They are starting to ban certain sites, curtail freedom of speech and our military have even created an army of pro government propaganda trolls. 

If we were not influenced so much by society then why would there be a need to go to such lengths to control the narrative, and why would the Chinese government, for example, attempt to throttle free speech on the internet? Clearly certain narratives are dominant and are reproduced across society. Big narratives are ideologically determined by the media and often go unchallenged. These form the basis of political discourse and try to make it more palatable to the everyday layman by simplifying things. 

'Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller' (G. K. Chesterton, 1905).

Here we can give an example of how narratives proliferate the mindset of a nation.

Bertie lives in a reclusive village and is a reader of a propaganda rag that masquerades as a newspaper. In the pages of the 'Daily Fail' it speaks of the horrors of foreign immigrants coming over here to maliciously steal our jobs and pillage our benefits system. 

Bertie has never seen an immigrant before but he doesn't need to. He has all the facts he needs to know already. He can go down the pub in the evening and recite these horror stories. As he slams down his drink proclaiming that immigrants have ruined this country, his compatriots nod along in unanimous agreement.

Perhaps if Bertie left his insular village and went out to meet some of these 'horrendous' immigrants who have only 'come here to commit crime and cheat us', he might discover that most of them are the same as us. They want enough money to have a decent standard of living, and be happy. 

Many are prepared to work hard for this opportunity and have left their families behind to try and escape the poverty trap they found themselves in. Others have fled war zones and risked their lives by placing themselves in the clutches of people smugglers who profit from desperation.

Immigrants are a convenient scapegoat for the abject failings of successive governments. Whilst immigration inevitably causes some problems, it is more convenient for the government to say it is immigrants who have put public services, such as the NHS, under strain than to admit that their philosophical outlook is completely broken and is failing its citizens.

Check out the scandalous PFI contracts as a clear example of how Neo Liberal economic orthodxy is bleeding us dry.  Then compare how many stories about PFI contracts and immigrants there are. Do you see a pattern occurring? What did you make of the expose at 25:30? Is this legalised institutional corruption bleeding the taxpayer dry, or is the problem really eastern Europeans working a shitty minimum wage job and paying taxes?

In any case, Bertie may come across a bad example that reinforces his stereotype, or he may meet someone who challenges his view. The point here is that whatever experience he has, at least he can reason from the solid grounds of direct experience instead of a reported knowledge that was designed to fit an ideological viewpoint. That's a start at least.

Whilst Bertie might end up committing another fallacy by tarring everyone with the same brush, at least he has made an effort to see if his assumptions were true, even if he doesn't change his convictions. 

The moral of this story is simply that it is so easy and common place to reason from untested assumptions, that it is natural for us to absorb narrative accounts and use these as a basis to draw conclusions. Most often,  we simply absorb the conclusions we are spoon fed by society that may or may not have a factual basis. 

The important thing to realise here is that we are now in the business of checking our assumptions and conclusions with a fine toothed comb, and we are aware that this pattern of dishonesty is so common place that we often don't realise we are doing it. Unlike Bertie, we cannot rest on mere generalisations derived from our limited experience either. 

We are going to have to dig much deeper.  

It is not honest enquiry to say “I must exist” without actually checking all the assumptions. Naturally, the difficulty in looking at no self arises from the standpoint of being in the world as a supposed participant. We cannot simply reason that we don't exist as this is contradictory information to our experience so far in life. Nor can we do detached objective enquiry, since we are always already within the bounds of our cultural preconceptions that shape how we process that knowledge.  

It should now be not so shocking to you to conceive that if it is possible for adults with a brain to absorb narrative accounts from propaganda gutter journalism, then the possibilities for polluting a young inquisitive mind, that lacks critical thinking faculties are unlimited. We need only consider folly such as the tooth fairy, god, and father christmas for examples of perpetrating deception.

Your teachers, parents, and society at large, had a head start in telling you things were a certain way and, unlike the father christmas story, you never once stopped to question what you were told. 

It might seem obvious and intuitive that we are an agent pulling the strings behind our experience. Once we start to peel back our assumptions and unearth our dishonesty though, we discover that there is not much logical basis for our assertions and that our received 'default wisdom' is quite empty. 

We may assert that there is some being in the tree telling its leaves how to grow but this is just as empty an assertion as claiming there is a self that directs the thoughts and actions. Our enquiry therefore, is not focussed on logically denying our existence or assessing dialectical arguments endlessly. 

We have to look at the phenomena unfolding in reality at the present moment. 

Crucially though, we also have to be aware this enquiry can be distorted by our taken for granted beliefs and assumptions and this is where dishonesty comes in to play for the fair enquirer. By utilising looking, and logic as a tool, we can actually discover the doublethink in which we are engaged, which supports the notion of being an independent entity living in an internal world that directs the bodies actions in an external world.

By now you should have a very solid grasp that we cannot take anything for granted – we have to do the work and test it out. 

In this manner, we need to be vigilant of when we are using untested assumptions and investigate them instead. We also need to drop any reasoning that are extended from any untested assumptions. We will look at a comprehensive example later on, but for now you need to be aware that this pattern is so very very easy to fall in to, and infects a surprising facet of what we think of as 'truth'.  

It is now pertinent to turn our attention to begin to look at how we conceptualise this self on an intuitive level...




The Fairytale of Dishonesty >

One of the consequences of discovering the traditional notions of self-hood within the Cartesian picture are incoherent, is that it does challenge our conception of the individual in society. The Cartesian picture is based on the simple object-subject relations that we use to frame the world around us. 

When we say Cartesian picture, what we are referring to is Descartes' account of dualism, where we view subjects and objects as discrete causal entities. However, once we start looking at the concepts on which the illusion of self is based, we start discover that things aren't what they seemed initially and our assumptions don't hold water too well. 

Implicit in this Cartesian picture then, is the idea that there are other causal selves out there, who are separate from the world and act independently as agents. This brings us to a series of fundamental problems that have troubled social psychologists since the field began its empirical endeavours. 

These problems are known as the 'agency-structure' divide, and 'individual-society' dualism. 
Let's unpack these terms and try to stipulate exactly what they mean.

Agency-Structure Dualism

What we mean by the Agency-structure divide is where we delineate individual agency from social practices, or the structure of of our social world. 

For example, we can consider peer pressure to start smoking cigarettes as an example of this. 
We might ask what role does individual agency play here, when the social structure people find themselves part of, may place pressure on its members to smoke? 


We may argue that peer pressure may influence our agency, however, if we knew smoking was harmful then why would we ever utilise our agency and choose to smoke? If we answered “Because everyone else is doing it” then we have clearly allowed societal pressure to influence our actions, and it is here where we ask; was it society making the structural conditions for action, or was it the self sufficient subject making a decision in isolation from the social world? 

Individual-Society Dualism

 With individual-society dualism, we are stepping outside of society metaphorically and looking at where an individual starts and ends. To what extent is someone an individual separate from society, and to what extent is society embroiled within the individual? 
Going back to our peer pressure example, the person being pressured in to smoking will use concepts and shared language from the social world and in this sense, the shared social world we inhabit, forms a part of each of the individuals within it. 

At this stage we might have an opinion about which of these is correct. For instance, we can argue away the agency structure divide by placing the onus on the individuals agency. In this sense we would like to claim that the executive function overrides peer pressure and people have a choice ultimately. 

However, when I look back at my own experience it seems to conflict with this account. If you can ever remember a time when you were subject to peer pressure, was it not the case you felt an urge to go along with the moment, and experienced the dissonance of thoughts related to the future negative outcomes of your actions? 

It seems counterintuitive to separate this into a simple matter of exercising rationality independently from the situation we are in. Were we to have the ability to do this, then phenomena such as peer pressure would not exist. 
This highlights the impoverished view of self sufficient Cartesian 'selves', that subsist separately from the social worlds we inhabit. 

In the Cartesian picture we have to view minds as self-sufficient entities that process intentional content. By intentional content, we simply mean content in the form of imagery, concepts, feelings, and the like, which 'cause' our actions or intentionality. 

We need not deny that there is intentional content, however, this does not necessarily entail this processing occurs independently or closed off from the situation we find ourselves in. 
It is clear this process is influenced according to circumstance, and it is our being in this situation which helps to shape our actions and responses. In this sense our cognition is embodied, and does not operate independently from such situations.

Drawing the Line?

This area has been contentious among social psychologists. It was the orthodox view to simply assume that individuals acted completely independently from the social world. However, we can clearly see from our peer pressure example that this view is untenable. 
What we are really talking about is the way in which we are interrelated with the social world, and on this account, it makes no sense to draw binary distinctions such as agency-structure, and individual–society and  claim they are mutually exclusive. 

This does raise questions about where we draw the line between agency and social structures, and the State versus the individual. Our justice system implicitly assumes the Cartesian picture is correct, and relies on it for notions of individual responsibility and guilt. Furthermore, this also brings into question the notions of left and Right wing politics which tacitly assume one side of the dualism. 

We might also ask is it being born into poverty that causes crime, or is it just a few bad eggs that need to be separated from the rest of us? 

Clearly the way in which we conceptualise the individual and society is quite important, since it is one of the cornerstones upon which the foundations of our society is based upon. Even the way we view ourselves as consumers presupposes that we are trying to further our own individual interests. Of course, we can view this as an extension from our animalistic survival instincts  but we are not just self interested, since we care about the people around us - our family and friends.  

What if we've had it all wrong? 

The point here is not to argue for or against a particular political system, but it is to highlight the way in which the individual and society is conceptualised. 

What if self interest was an illusion that we had subscribed to all our lives, and how would this influence the way we conceptualised the political field? 

How can we conceptualise individual agency and justice if there is no such thing as individual free will?

It seems these notions are empty in the sense that they inherently exist. We can make sense of them conventionally, although we can question the substance behind them.

Of course, we will not be able to put this to bed in one foul swoop, but I hope we can apply what we have learned to our phenomenological investigations (AKA Looking), that you are hopefully undertaking as a result of coming across www.ghostvirus.com 

We have a tendency to think within the constraints of the subject-object dichotomy and this has been conditioned into us from the very beginning. When it comes to delineating ourselves from society, it becomes difficult purely for the fact that we are carving up cause-and-effect into the subject-object regime. What we need to do is bracket off this preconception, and apply the results from our experimentation into the mix. 

 There seems to be a real difficulty in trying to carve up the individual as some discrete entity separate from the world itself, when our very being is intertwined with the ever changing world which constantly throws up new scenarios, and the cultural practices that shape our thinking. 

Anywhere we try to find a dividing line between discrete individuals and society, we run in to major problems. Of course, it makes sense that we try to provide accounts of how individuals behave and reason etc which has been the goal of psychology. 
However, we find that psychology is always in a social context and to theorise the individual as being isolated from the social world, creates a subject-object dualism that cannot be consistently maintained.
  

Of course we were not around in those days when we are asked to lay something on the line to defend our freedoms. It was a long time since we had anything to lose, perhaps the only time that as Englishmen we stood to lose anything was back in 1941 when we really had something to lose – our freedom. Those were the days of the blitz and the impending Nazi invasion that never came. I had always wondered what it was like to fight in world war II it was always a bit of a curiosity for me. 

Whenever I felt a little bit of fear I would always think back to what my granddad's life was like. When I was shoving drugs down my neck and dancing at illegal raves at the age of 22 in forests, barns, abandoned warehouses and the like, my granddad was probably sat in an underground bunker receiving his orders for the next bombing sortie. 

My granddad flew in the RAF over the Polestei oilfields of Romania - the most heavily defended airspace in the whole of Europe during WWII. It was the logistical engine of the Nazi war machine churning out virtually all of the oil that they needed for the war effort. As a result the average number of bombing sorties was four before you were shot down. If my granddad was alive today I would have asked him just one thing. How did you feel when you climbed in to that Wellington bomber knowing that the law of averages told you that you would likely lose your life? On your 12^th bombing run how did you feel when you stepped in to the plane knowing the law of averages told you that you would die? How did it actually feel, what was the experience like granddad?

I cannot comprehend what he did because I do not know what it is like to put my life on the line. I have nothing but admiration for what he did, the people he defended, the lives he saved, and the free world he played his part in saving. The fact that he climbed in to the plane knowing that he could die, his bravery leaves me in awe. He probably got back from a bombing run feeling relieved he had made it and then went to the operations room to look at which incoming planes made it home, hoping in the back of his mind that his comrades would return, waiting anxiously, sometimes knowing that after a while he would never see his friends again because they had perished fighting the evil of the fascists, and had laid down their lives so we could enjoy the freedoms we enjoy today. I salute you granddad you really are a hero in my eyes.

To put it in perspective my granddad was just one man. One of many who fought against the twisted evil of the Nazi war machine, so in that respect he is not unique, chances are every one of you is somehow related to someone who put their life on the line so we can enjoy these freedoms we take for granted everyday.

That was then though and this is now, back then some sacrifice from everyone was required as we were at war at the time, it was right that everyone stood up and did their part. Now we are left with the legacy, the absolute paragon of human civilisation through the ages. We live in a free global market economy that, barring certain dictatorships, has the most personal freedom that has ever been known, the greatest amount of prosperity at any time in history, and the greatest democracy that this money can buy us.

Stop for a minute and soak it up. Do you actually think about how bad it could of been, or perhaps how great, and what a wonderful place the world is right now? How we have no problems whatsoever and everything is perfect and right with the world as it is? Do you ever stop and think about this? Stop for a minute and reflect on what you really have. What do you have to show for the fruits of your life? Lets face it, without friends and family we would have nothing of value.

The best things in life are free.

But why is it that we can say this to ourselves like a mantra and it does not really seem to do much apart from divert our attention away from the fact that we are all struggling somehow? Why is that we are never completely content and why is it that there is something we can never quite put our finger on, that bugs us? It need not be all the time or it may even be a preoccupation for you, but all through your life there was something just that slight discontent, that little nagging doubt that you cannot quite put your finger on. Lets just outline it for you with an example. Perhaps you are about to get a new promotion and you get it and life is great. Then after the initial buzz you are left feeling some how a little hollow and empty. Not depressed or miserable, but slightly discontented like you did not feel as though you expected to feel. Like you expected a little more from this situation and now you are slightly dissatisfied again.

Appearances are a funny thing.

Appearances are what we seem to place most of our trust in but I am not talking about our visual capabilities as such, I am talking about the way we construe things, how we see them as in “I can see what he is saying” and “I can see how that would pose a problem”. There is a subset of appearances that we see everyday and this is built on top of a framework of concepts and assumptions. It is funny really, we can turn to look at the appearances of our lives but that is about as far we ever look.

We never scratch beneath the surface and on the level of appearances we are happy to ponder over superficial things, take moral postures on issues, criticise peoples actions, lay down our insights, or have a bit of banter and make light of things. However, something is always lost here and whilst we can be accused of taking life too seriously the truth of the matter is that we seem to be more engaged in this level of appearances rather than the actual substance that underpins these appearances. 

Style over substance every time.

The way you view everything is inside a predetermined conceptual framework, every facet of your life is within a framework of right and wrong, should do and should not do, have to , must nots and various other constraints which can take many different forms. There are social expectations imposed by your friends, there are different social constraints imposed by your family, your grandparents etc... Your work place behaviour is different again, you probably feel that you hold back at work and some of you may even feel like you live a double life as such.

From this we can already see that we, at least to some varying degrees, conform to other peoples expectations of us and in a sense there is a societal code that we are obeying. We restrict our behaviour in that respect and this is one of the things that is just below the surface of our lives that does not get a look unless it is bought to your attention. This is trivial though and you could find it in any sociology text book, this really is not a new level of insight in life, however, it does represent a glimpse of the white rabbit scurrying towards the hole. Only, you never dared to follow it you always turned a blind eye.

There are certain patterns at play in your life.

We all know someone who is struggling to get by and forgive me for being so forward, but I know that you are probably not particularly happy either. Lets have a look at your life, all we have to do is scratch beneath the surface and we can see how shallow it really is. So here goes, this is what you do with your life and it is pretty obvious to anyone looking in from the outside. You believe that by buying certain products or waiting for certain events to happen, whatever they maybe, they will make you somehow complete and happy.

This is a simple as we can boil it down this is pretty much the core pattern of your life.

You actually have the beliefs deep down that you actually need these things and your happiness depends on them. Deep down underneath it all, you are bouncing from one thing to the next expecting to find happiness but instead you are finding fleeting feelings of happiness. Then you become disgruntled and try to find the next big thing that is going to make you happy. 

Then you simply rinse and repeat.

You cannot win and the fact that you tell yourself I can't wait until X, or I'll be better when Y happens is self evident. If you are stuck in the same space you become unhappy, if you keep moving you are trying hard to find the next thing that will make you happy and when you get it - be it a new promotion, a relationship, a car, whatever your focus is on, you find that once you get it the buzz wears off and you are left yearning for more. You are trying to fill a gaping void with material goods and validation and you do not even know why.

If you can drop your jumped up pretentious little ego for a minute this is actually your life isn't it?

Even when you look back as a child you used to bug your parents for the latest toy and then a few weeks later you would be bored of it and cast it aside, once you were sucked in to the next advertising campaign for the next hot product. This pattern was started when you were younger and the tragic thing is you did not choose to do this you were simply manipulated in to it. Fast forward a few years and you probably think to yourself that you are above this mentality and likely some of you are even conscious of this but just stop for a minute.

Just stop and look at your life for a minute. 

I want you to be honest here not with me, but with yourself. Just look at your life right now and look at the goals you want to achieve. Try to visualise them and ask yourself will I be perfectly contented once I achieve these goals? If this is the case then what is stopping you from being contented right now? 

How do you expect to be contented then in the future if you cannot be contented right now? Do you think you can just flick a switch?

You are still going to be the same flawed person with more more trivial goods. You have the mind set of a consumer because even though you are above yearning for mummy to buy you the latest thing, you still have this goal orientated attitude to life. Even now you are following the same predictable pattern but you have just lied to yourself and replaced the toys with something more tangible. Really, you are just clinging to hope blindly aren't you?

You actually think everything is going to work out for you eventually don't you?

You actually believe that once things calm down you will just be able to chill out in a few years, be comfortable, life will be calm and relaxed, you will have more time to do those things you wanted to do and more time to spend with your family. You keep clinging to this blind bit of hope like a lifeboat instead of facing up to the reality you live in now, right at this moment. You do everything you can to avoid facing up to this reality right this second. It is never going to work out any differently for you, even if it does you will be the same flawed person you always have been.

I know what you really want, deep down, lurking inside that disturbing little mind of yours.

I know that what you really want is to have the admiration of your peers. Yes, you even fantasise about people standing in awe of you, you even fantasise about your boss congratulating you on your latest project, your friends telling you that your ace, I bet you even compare how many people turn up to your birthday party so people don't think your a loser don't you? Yes, I am talking to you. You are floating around in the endless cesspool of failure you call your life, which is lived in the service of what you revere as the absolute paragon of human accomplishment; vanity.

'Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.' (Ecclesiastes)

In fact, you even give people the power to have this opinion of you and enslave you in to the social hierarchy. Yes, you care so much about what people think of you and your life is based around this game of vanity. Every time you get dressed you look in the mirror and wonder what people will think of you. You walk around the street looking at everyone else or averting their gaze wondering what they think of you. You spend all your life wondering how people perceive you, and trying to impress them, and this is pretty much the primary focus of your life. Oh what? You have other interests as well? Sure you do, but just try and notice how many times you think about other peoples opinion of you. If you actually tried to notice consciously, you would find that this represents one of the driving forces of your life. Why? Because you have been socially engineered this way.

What is it like at work for you?

How many people do you see with a smile on their face? How many people look glum on your way to work, those empty grey faces staring down the road, how many times do you curse the car in front of you just because they miss a two second gap in the traffic and it threatens that you will be a minute late for work. Yes, I am talking to you. Would you choose to do it if you had to? Would you choose your shitty £10 an hour job if you didn't have to? And what about those of you who earn good money and don't enjoy your job? What excuse do you tell yourself? Do you tell yourself that your family needs this money, do you set yourself little goals to work towards and think I'll be happy then, like it is something you can just decide to be at the flick of a switch? You actually do this don't you?

You see friend, the problem is that we have lost sight of what really matters. We actually believe money is the ends in which we have to work towards, when in actual fact it is merely the vehicle that we are supposed to work with. You have not thought long or hard about this have you? Either you are enslaved wishing you had more money or you are enslaved to the thought of having more money for its own sake. You get more and you just spend more, you are never any better off you are just treading water doing the same thing following the same pattern you have been programmed to follow.

The thing is, if you take a step back out of it for a moment you actually think this is a hard earned freedom the really ironic thing is that you actually believe this is a fundamental freedom that you have been afforded. I cannot begin to tell you how naïve and brainwashed you are. You think that if you pay out some money for the latest product then everything will be better, you even turn a blind eye when it is pretty obvious that the world is not going to be able to sustain this level of consumption for too much longer. No, you would rather spend your life working a job you hate to buy things you do not need, to fight each other over scrambling up a ladder that leads to a mountain of bull shit with a bunch of feckless morons who you secretly despise, and all for a boss who you wish you could tell him to shove his job right up his arse.

This, incredibly, is the very thing that you hold as a sacred freedom and as something of value.

This vacuous routine that you never once stopped to question whether it was a worthwhile pursuit, you just went along with it because you followed the rest of the sheep. John Keynes, the guy who you know as the Keynesian father of economics stated 'The market was made for human beings - not human beings to serve the market'. This is where you have failed to see what is happening but don't worry it is not your fault, we were all sold this lie. You see, we are blind to this unless we take a step back, the adherence to this system is indoctrinated in to you at school, many of you (although I believe a few of you will have done) have never even stopped to question this framework that structures our lives to a large degree.

So, I will ask you what happened when the Iraq war kicked off, where were you and what did you do about it? Did you go to work and ignore the protest, or did you jump on a moral grandstand and try to tell everyone about the lies the government told. I mean lets face it, the government clearly lied about weapons of mass destruction whichever way you look at it and then in order to justify their lie they focussed on the morality of freeing the Iraqi people from the evil tyrant Saddam Hussein. True, he was an evil man but the government does not have a track record for doing nice things. We need only look at the times when we have stood aside while genocides happen to see that humanitarian aims are superfluous next to the goals of the big oil companies. Lets look at who won in this war, the arms companies and the oil companies, all at the expense of you, yes you the British taxpayer.

What is striking is that you did nothing, you just shrugged your shoulders and carried on going to work. You did not even flinch when Tony Blair's grinning, conniving face appeared on your TV screen telling you one of the biggest lies to your face. You just went to work and wondered which new thing you were going to buy. Or failing that you cared about how people would think about you if you jumped on a moral grandstand and started talking about it.

Amazing that most of you just stood aside and allowed this to happen and you did not even bat an eye lid. You just shrugged your shoulders and pretended it was not happening. You lied to yourself and started to believe something else to divert your attention away from the fact that you had just been lied to and you swallowed it straight down without the slightest bit of resistance.

Or you just shrugged your shoulders even though you knew it was a lie.

What you did not realise is that this is not the only time you have been lied to. As a result of you turning a blind eye every time you have been shafted you have simply got in to a pattern of repeating this behaviour. It really does boil down to elementary psychological techniques, you are just being manipulated like a pawn. You will never achieve anything of value because it is all based on lies. This system forms the fundamental basis for your life and it is a vacuous, empty lie therefore, a life in servitude of this is worth nothing. I am not judging you, the point is you have spent your whole life looking at appearances when underneath it all underpinning it, is a toxic and foul bunch of lies that have never been challenged. These lies are the worm that is eating its way in to the very fabric of our society and the trouble is some of you even know this is happening.

You need to look at the substance of what your life is based on because appearances are deceptive. Look at that TOWIE program for all that is wrong with our society for instance. The tragic thing is people hold this up as a shining example of the absolute paragon of human accomplishment. A bunch of retarded fucks who would lose a battle of the wits with a cheese sandwich, yet people actually aspire to be like them and (god help us) even try to imitate them. I am not here to bag these people in particular but in many other areas of our society we have other lies such as religion, propaganda news broadcasts (admittedly not as bad as America), companies feeding us with sugar laden chemical crap, need I go on? Start to look at your life and you will see the lies you blissfully ignore or actively pedal to yourself everyday but it takes a shred of courage to face up to the truth.

'The opposite of the truth is not a lie the opposite of truth is cowardice' (Stepvhen)

How do we change it? We change it from within, we move to a new paradigm where capital and its influence is rendered inert. Money is not the problem and neither is capitalism. It is simply our greed and vanity that has been socially engineered in to us. We spend our lives working for a market that was originally supposed to distribute goods among us. The power of the market has simply become too great and we are subservient to the very mechanism that is supposed to work for us as human beings. That is where we went wrong. 

What we need is to be the change we wish to see in the world. Now this is a big ask but it is not impossible any more. How do we just change to a paradigm of no greed?

Instead of making our world a better place for all of its inhabitants, all your hard work currently goes to things like this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18944097

Maybe we will never get it perfect and there will be some disparities but when we see this kind of thing, it shows you that this is what we have really achieved. This is the sum total of all of our hard work, to support the lifestyles of leeches who have never contributed anything. That is exactly what you are achieving now, whilst blindly clinging on to the hope that everything will work out for you eventually. You have just been duped your whole life but the thing is it is all based on a single lie that underpins this society, which once challenged, means you can step out from the machine and live freely. We can create a world in which we are truly free and we can live without being in service of a lie.

You can walk away in denial but why change the habit of a lifetime? Once a failure, always a a failure and for the rest of your days you will live a life blind to possibility and carry on the self serving greed and hopeless vanity as you have always done. Is that the shallow endeavours of your life, did you ever want anything better for yourself and the human race?

If all you ever do is live in servitude of a lie how do you expect to achieve anything of value?

You are achieving nothing with your life but perpetuating the problems as they are currently. Maybe my harsh critique was unfair on you but the fact remains you live your life in service to a lie, that requires your active participation to maintain the façade. You are the problem truth be told, you let it happen willingly.

What can one person do? Well imagine if my granddad and all his comrades thought like you. We would be eating sourkraut and speaking German by now. I know he and his comrades would probably turn in their graves knowing what a legacy of putrid, dishonest weaklings who let themselves become enslaved by their vanity and greed thinking they were free.

'None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free' (Goethe)

If he knew that he was going to put his life on the line and endured all that hell just so you could live your vain life, I would not expect him to step within 10 miles of an airfield. Is there a shred of humanity left in you? More to the point, do you even fucking care?

The new paradigm is a life without self image:

www.truthstrike.com