Propaganda, Sincere Speech, Intuition of the Samurai

He who can discern truth from lies survives on the battlefield, he who can’t, dies.

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I personally do not advocate any process or procedure contained in any of my Blogs. Information presented here is not intended to provide legal or lawful advice, nor medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevent any disease. Views expressed are for educational purposes only.

Battle for the hearts and minds of the people

By Mattias Desmet
May 14, 2024

As space for open minded conversation and non-conformist opinion shrivel, answering ‘what can we believe’ becomes increasingly difficult. Swarms of ‘digital first responders’ anonymously ridicule and criminalize dissident opinion on social media, machine learning technology identifies and suppresses online narratives that go against mainstream, search engine algorithms guide people inconspicuously to politically correct answers to all their questions.

The battle for the hearts and minds of the people rages more fiercely than ever in this era of propaganda, and Artificial Intelligence generating chatbots, artificial images, deep fake videos that can put the innocent in a bad daylight and make the guilty go free; it creates a ‘woke’ version of history with a radical contempt for facts as humanity gets lost in a world of manufactured falsehoods.

Who will protect society from censorship and falsehood?

The army of fact checkers claiming to fight ‘fake news’ are part of the problem. These ‘ambassadors of Truth’ have little to do with Truth. Origin of the virus, the mortality rate of the virus, the efficacy and safety of the vaccines; fact checkers promoted fake news and fought correct information. It’s clear to every body who wants to see it: they are a veritable Orwellian ministry of Truth.

The deceptive nature of Ego

Even when key influencers like Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci admit the vaccine did not stop spread of the virus, even when Neil Ferguson and Imperial College admit mortality rates of the virus were far lower than their models predicted, a major part of the population doesn’t really want to hear it.

The problem of deception in society is far more complex than just a bunch of manipulative propagandists who mislead the guileless population. It seems most people don’t care too much about being deceived. They even seem to admire those who deceive them. Quote of Hannah Arendt:

‘The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.'

Skilled little manipulator

In the final analysis, there is a little propagandist and manipulator in all of us, so skilled it succeeds in deceiving ourselves. As a human being we constantly hide behind ‘the veil of appearances.’ We hide certain aspects of who we are from others, we constantly try to conform to all kinds of ideal images that circulate in society. In the end, we believe we are the illusion we created ourselves – we fall prey to the deceptive nature of our Ego.

This applies fundamentally to speech. We are censored by others indeed, yet before others censor us we already censored ourselves. In the end, we speak words we don’t realize are not our words but hollow echoes from the matrix of social forms in which our being is absorbed.

The way out of this labyrinth of deception

Is there such a thing as Truth? Can we find it in this world of falsehood and illusions?

Allow me to summon an archetype banned in our culture: the archetype of the warrior. A warrior always stands with one leg in the land of Death. Truth is wandering around in this land. Samurai and ninja culture show us an interesting relationship between truth and intuition. I believe this relationship is relevant as it comes to finding a solution for the problem of propaganda and totalitarianism.

Discernment

For the samurai the martial arts boiled down to this: develop the capacity to discern truth from lie. The movements of the martial arts are linguistic in nature. Sometimes they lie, sometimes they speak the truth. The sword in the right hand attracts attention – the dagger in the left hand strikes. He who can discern truth from lies survives on the battlefield, he who can’t, dies.

One does not survive on the battlefield by looking with his eyes. Our eyes see a world of appearances; they are easily tricked. What really matters is awareness of the world around you not based on ordinary sensory perception. The entire art of the samurai aimed to develop this potential – the sixth sense of the warrior.

How did the samurai develop intuition?

The intuition of the warrior is related to the act of speech; sincere speech. We can distinguish between two types of speech, speech from Ego and speech from what we might call Soul.

The Ego is an imaginary structure based on identifications with outer ideal images. When we speak from Ego we do not articulate what we feel or experience inside. We say what we think we have to say to be accepted by others and society. It makes us win something at the level of Ego and comes with a price: we slowly lose touch with the essence of who we truly are.

Opposite of ego speech

Inside the shell of Ego is something mystical referred to as Soul, our core essence, our Spirit, our connection to the Divine.

From a psychological point of view, speaking from Soul means to give voice to things we truly feel or experience; things usually hidden behind ideal images. It means saying things not in line with the matrix of social ideal images, dogma’s and norms. Such speech makes us vulnerable, it puts us at risk of rejection, in particular when we practice it in the presence of people who use the world of appearances as their major stronghold.

Opposite of Ego speech, sincere speech makes us lose something in the world of appearances and it makes us win something in the real world. It is a kind of speech that emerges from within and literally penetrates through the outer ideal image we hide behind. It quite literally pierces holes in the Ego. And through these holes, a new resonating connection between our essence and that of the world around us can emerge. It is at this level we can situate the phenomenon of Truth. Continue at https://words.mattiasdesmet.org/p/propaganda-sincere-speech-and-the

Truth is the only remedy for a society sick from lies

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