Re: Soldier Betrayed by Online Informant with Wikileaks
Guardian, when we discuss stuff like Assange or any other public figure, we do not consider that any piece of data or perception is off limits. Time and time again we have experienced someone holding back something because it sounded "mean" or "not fair" or "catty" or whatever, and that turned out to be the very clue that was needed to solve the puzzle.
And WHY do people hold back what comes into their minds when discussing another person? Because we have been programmed by psychopathic culture to believe that discussing DATA or OBSERVATIONS or FEELINGS that one has or collects about a person is "gossip" or "not polite" or "not fair" or they should have a chance to defend themselves, or whatever.
The problem with that is the "plausible lie."
Plausible lies are monstrous things propagated by evil people for the express purpose of deceiving good people into doing the will of those who do not have their best interests at heart. It's that simple. The most powerful of these lies are so plausible that nobody even dreams about questioning their validity.
Suppose that tomorrow when you walk out of your house, an alien spacecraft lands in front of you. Aliens get out and assault you, leaving physical traces. Next, imagine that this is not a hallucination, it is not dream; it really happens. You are now in possession of an implausible truth. What chance is there of you being able to convince anyone else of what happened to you? You know it is the truth, but no one will believe you. And the root of the problem is the fact that truth generally has a feeling of reality to it. However, that feeling of reality which makes truth generally plausible is NOT the same thing as the truth itself. Others who have not experienced aliens landing and assaulting them do not have the same feeling of reality about what you are telling them. If everyone else had experienced a similar event, with the attendant feeling of reality, the truth of that event would be accepted immediately.
In short, people believe what is "familiar," or what is part of a careful, long term program of familiarization of lies that become plausible simply because they are familiar.
When science first discovered that solid matter was mostly empty space, many people reacted to this truth - this unfamiliar fact of our reality - with outrage. Debates over the "solidity" of matter and "kicking rocks" raged for years. It took a very long time, and a lot of work to gradually make others aware of this truth in order to make this "implausible" fact part of our awareness.
Learning about evil in our society, how it operates on the macro-social scale, is considered by many to be "unpleasant." They don't want to go there. It is too disturbing and even frightening. More than that, talking about these things as I am here is not familiar. To talk about evil as though it were a REAL concept is something we have been programmed to NOT do! As psychologist George Simon says:
…[W]e’ve been pre-programmed to believe that people only exhibit problem behaviors when they’re “troubled” inside or anxious about something. We’ve also been taught that people aggress only when they’re attacked in some way. So, even when our gut tells us that somebody is attacking us and for no good reason, we don’t readily accept the notion. We usually start to wonder what’s bothering the person so badly “underneath it all” that’s making them act in such a disturbing way. We may even wonder what we may have said or done that “threatened” them. We almost never think that they might be fighting simply to get something, have their way, or gain the upper hand. So, instead of seeing them as merely fighting, we view them as primarily hurting in some way. [...]
The legacy of Sigmund Freud’s work has a lot to do with this. Freud’s theories (and the theories of others who built upon his work) heavily influenced the psychology of personality for a long time. Elements of the classical theories of personality found their way into many disciplines other than psychology as well as into many of our social institutions and enterprises. [...]
The malignant impact of overgeneralizing Freud’s observations about a small group of overly inhibited individuals into a broad set of assumptions about the causes of psychological ill-health in everyone cannot be overstated.[…]
We need a completely different theoretical framework if we are to truly understand, deal with, and treat the kinds of people who fight too much as opposed to those who cower or “run” too much. {George K. Simon, Jr., “In Sheep’s Clothing”}
We clearly need to study this problem of macro-social evil in our world in a systematic and scientific way. And we need to get over the idea that thinking only good thoughts, thinking about happy and "nice" things is the way to good psychological health.
If physicians behaved like ethicists and failed to study diseases because they were only interested in studying questions of health, there would be no such thing as modern medicine. […] Physicians were correct in their emphasis on studying disease above all in order to discover the causes and biological properties of illnesses, and then to understand the pathodynamics of their courses. A comprehension of the nature of a disease, and the course it runs, after all, enables the proper curative means to be elaborated and employed.[…]
The question thus arises: could some analogous modus operandi not be used to study the causes and genesis of other kinds of evil scourging human individuals, families, societies? Experience has taught the author that evil is similar to disease in nature, although possibly more complex and elusive to our understanding. [...]
Considerable moral, intellectual, and practical advantages can be gleaned from an understanding of the genesis of Evil thanks to the objectivity required to study it dispassionately. The human heritage of ethics is not destroyed by taking such an approach: it is actually strengthened because the scientific method can be utilized to confirm the basic values of moral teachings.
Understanding the nature of macro-social pathology helps us to find a healthy attitude and thus protects our minds from being controlled or poisoned by the diseased contents and influence of their propaganda.
We can only conquer this huge, contagious social cancer if we comprehend its essence and its etiological causes.
Such an understanding of the nature of the phenomena leads to the logical conclusion that the measures for healing and reordering the world today should be completely different from the ones heretofore used for solving international conflicts. It is also true that, merely having the knowledge and awareness of the phenomena of the genesis of macro-social Evil can begin healing individual humans and help their minds regain harmony. {Andrew Lobaczewski, Ph.D. Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes}
As Robert Canup writes, we face a particular, even monstrous, problem in our world: that most of what we know or think we know is based on plausible lies. A person who is sincere and speaks the truth really has almost no chance against a plausible liar. Yes, I know that goes against everything we have been taught from childhood in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,” but it is all too sadly true. We have been taught that "the Truth will always win" and that "anybody who believes a lie about you wasn’t your friend to begin with", and a whole host of other platitudes that actually would work in a different world: a world run by people who tell the truth!
But since our world is run by people who lie for a living, you might expect that they have set things up so that liars will always win. And that is, oh so sadly, the case.
“Our culture agrees on the signs of lying. Ask anyone how to tell if someone is lying and they will tell you that they can tell by “lack of eye contact, nervous shifting, or picking at one’s clothes.” Psychologist Anna Salter writes with dry humor: “This perception is so widespread I have had the fantasy that, immediately upon birth, nurses must take newborns and whisper in their ears, “Eye contact. It’s a sign of truthfulness.” {Anna C. Salter, Ph.D.}
The problem is, if there is a psychopath – or those with related characteropathies – who doesn’t know hot to keep good eye contact when lying, they haven’t been born. Eye contact is “universally known” to be a sign of truth-telling. The problem is liars will fake anything that it is possible to fake, so in reality, eye contact is absolutely NOT a sign of truth telling. Let me give an example from Salter's book. She writes:
The man in front of me is a Southern good-ole-boy, the kind of man I grew up with and like. If anything, I have a weakness for the kind of Southern male who can “Sam Ervin” you, the Southern lawyer who wears red suspenders in court along with twenty-five-year-old cowboy boots and who turns his accent up a notch when he sees the northern expert witness coming. A “northern city slicker” on the witness stand will elicit the same kind of focused interest that a deer will in hunting season. You can have some very long days in court with men who wear red suspenders and start by telling you how smart you are and how simple and dumb they are.
I survey the man in front of me. I am not in court; I am in prison, and he is not an attorney but a sex offender, and he has bright eyes along with that slow, sweet drawl. He is a big man, slightly balding, and he has – I have to admit there is such a thing – an innocent face. …
My Southern good-ole-boy certainly knows eye contact is considered a sign of truthfulness. He describes his manner in getting away with close to 100 rapes of adults and children.
good ole boy said:
The manner that I use when I was trying to convince somebody – even though I knew I was lying – I’d look them in the eye, but I wouldn’t stare at them. Staring makes people uncomfortable and that tends to turn them away, so I wouldn’t stare at them. But look at them in a manner that, you know, “look at this innocent face. How can you believe that I would do something like that?” It helps if you have a good command of the vocabulary where you can explain yourself in a way that is easily understood. Dress nice. Use fluent hand gestures that are not attacking in any way.
It’s a whole combination of things. It’s not any one thing that you can do. It’s a whole combination of things that your body gestures and things that say “Look, I’m telling you the truth, and I don’t know what these people are trying to pull. I don’t know what they’re trying to prove, but I haven’t done any of this. I don’t know why they’re doing this. You can check my records. I’ve got a good record. I’ve never been in any trouble like this. And I don’t know what’s going on. I’m confused.”…
As if reading my thoughts, he breaks off: “You don’t’ get this, Anna, do you?” he says. “You think that when I’m asked, “Did I do it?’ that’s when I lie. But I’ve been lying every day for the last twenty-five years.”
The practiced liar: a category of liar that even experts find it difficult to detect.
Problem is, even when dealing with people who are not practiced liars, such as college students who have volunteered for a research study of lying, most observers are not as good as they think in detecting deception. The research shows consistently that most people – even most professional groups such as police and psychologists – have no better than a chance ability to detect deception. Flipping a coin would serve as well.
good ole boy said:
“If you want to deny something, make sure you’ve got an element of truth in it. It sounds like its true, and there are elements of it that are very true that can be checked out, and try to balance it so that it has more truth than lie, so that when it is checked out, even if the lie part does come out, there’s more truth there than lie.”
This man was good enough that once he got away with stomping out of court in a huff. He was accused by his sister of raping her and molesting her daughter on the same day. He played it as a preposterous charge. His sister, he told the court, had once accused his uncle of abuse. She was well known in the family for making up crazy charges like this. He said he wasn’t going to put up with such nonsense and walked out. No one stopped him, and no one ever called him back. The charge just disappeared somehow. He now admits that both charges were true.
It is likability and charm that he wields as weapons.
The double life is a powerful tactic. There is the pattern of socially responsible behavior in public that causes people to drop their guard, and to turn a deaf ear to disclosures. The ability to charm, to be likable, to radiate sincerity and truthfulness, is crucial to the successful liar – and they practice assiduously.
“Niceness is a decision,” writes Gavin De Becker in “The Gift of Fear.” It is a “strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait.”
Despite the decades of research that have demonstrated that people cannot reliably tell whose lying and who isn’t, most people believe they can. There is something so fundamentally threatening about the notion that we cannot really know whether or not to trust someone that it is very difficult to get anyone – clinicians, citizens, even police – to take such results seriously.
This is an issue that will never die. It seems impossible to convince people that private behavior cannot be predicted from public behavior. Kind, nonviolent individuals behave well in public, but so do predators, rapists, murderers, pedophiles and COINTELPRO agents who help to shape the culture in which we live. No, they weren't always called COINTELPRO, but the principle is the same. It has been used since time immemorial. The earliest written records we have are of "clappers" in the audiences of theaters in ancient Greece. What do you think the term "Greek Chorus" means? We have exactly that in the present day in the form of the mainstream media. Did you think that, with the power of the internet to reach millions of people that the "powers that be" would have ignored the necessity of installing a "Greek Chorus" on the net? "The chorus offered background and summary information to help the audience follow the performance, commented on main themes, and showed how an ideal audience might react to the drama as it was presented. They also represent the general populace of any particular story." Discussion boards are ideal formats for "Greek Choruses" as they can be vectored to "show how the ideal audience ought to react," and to "represent the general populace." In this way, the illusion can be created of a consensus when, in fact, such a consensus may not exist.
Consider our legal system. Here you first have to ask yourself just what kind of people were in charge of the creation and shaping of our “social norms.” Now sure, everybody will agree with the sayings that “you can’t trust a politician,” or “power corrupts” and so on, but have you ever really stopped to think about that and what it must really mean?
Those at the top will ALWAYS take whatever measures necessary to stay at the top, and when knowledge is power, that means that they will make sure that they are in control of what people know or think they know. The sad fact is that as a society gets larger and more competitive, individuals become more anonymous and more Machiavellian. Social stratification and segregation leads to feelings of inferiority, pessimism and depression among the have-nots, and this promotes the use of "cheating strategies" in life which then makes the environment more adaptive for psychopathy in general. Such individuals may begin their lives in the lower socio-economic levels, but they often rise to the top. Psychopathic behavior seems to be on the rise because of the very nature of American capitalistic society. The great hustlers, charmers, and self-promoters in the sales fields are perfect examples of where the psychopath can thrive. The entertainment industry, the sports industry, the corporate world in a Capitalistic system, are all areas where psychopaths naturally rise to the top. Psychopaths seek power over others, it's that simple, and they gravitate to any field where there is power: medicine, law, industry, politics. It has always been that way; this is nothing new. Indeed, they comprise a very small segment of the population with an extremely large influence. It is due to this influence and the plausible lie that they can magnetize normal, decent people to follow them. They can make social conditions bad so that people feel oppressed and abused, and then they can easily blame it on someone else and agitate the people to go after and kill others based on such lies. Machiavelli discussed this sort of system plainly and openly and it has been the system of power since Cain killed Abel.
So, consider the idea that the ideas behind our social and cultural systems – including the legal system – were created by people whose agenda was to control society so that they could stay on top. And think about all the many ways they might go about doing that.
These are the same people who set up the legal system so that people would “get what they deserved”
Now, just think about that for a moment.
Imagine that you are a person at the top of the heap who knows that if you really set up a system where people got what they really deserved, you, yourself, would be instantly replaced - out the door in an instant! And so, if you are not just intent on staying on top and holding power, but cunning also, you will do everything in your power to insure that you and your kind are in charge of setting up that system, and that you remain in charge of it. You would make certain that evil was blended into the social and cultural concepts so seamlessly that nobody would ever notice.
And that is, quite literally, what happened. The individuals “at the top of the heap,” who had gotten there by being the most vile and rapacious, then set about figuring out ways to deceive the masses all the while keeping their favor and adulation. They knew they had to make laws to keep order, and they knew they had to make those laws seem fair and reasonable to the masses of people or they would lose control. Losing control was the thing to be feared as anyone who has read The Prince by Machiavelli realizes.
And so, Machiavellian manipulators at the top of the heap were deeply involved in the formation of our cultural and social norms, including our legal system.
In the earliest days of this “legal system” there was a form of “justice” called “trial by ordeal”. An example of trial by ordeal was holding a red hot iron to a defendant's tongue. The plausible lie used to justify this behavior was: if the defendant was telling a lie they would have a dry mouth and would be burned by the iron - while a truthful person would have a moist mouth and would be protected.
The fact is a NORMAL person who is telling the truth would most definitely have a dry mouth from fear, while a psychopath, who is incapable of feeling fear, would be the one with the moist mouth!!!
Now, just think about that for a few minutes.
Now, our current legal system is descended from “trial by ordeal” - and really isn't much different though it is much cleverer and simply not as obviously evil as that one was. You have already read a few examples above of just how the system works. As Anna Salter said, if she was accused of a crime, she would rather have a good lawyer than be innocent. That is a truly sad statement on our reality. Here’s a simple way to understand our legal system, adapted from the writings of Robert Canup:
Suppose that you are on a team that is engaged in a game and you discover that:
*The other team gets to make up the rules.
*The referee plays for the other team.
*One of the rules is that you are not allowed to score - the other team is at no risk
*Only you can be scored against.
That is precisely how our social, cultural, and legal systems operate.
The conditions of our world are designed to create the maximum chance that evil will prevail and the good people will be punished by being good and telling the truth.
Punishing normal, decent, good people involves more than just creating a social system that acts against them. The system is designed to insure that these good people are subjected to as much pain as possible for the simple fact of being good and honest. An obvious example of punishing the innocent may be found in the way the victim in a rape case is treated; their reputations are dragged through the dirt - all in the name of justice of course. Note the case quoted above, of the fellow who raped his sister and her daughter and walked out of court after accusing her of being a mental case.
The system that controls our thinking is set up like the legal system. People are taught to assume that, in any conflict, one side is lying one way, and the other is lying the other way, and people can just form opinions about which side is telling the truth. They are taught that the truth will lie somewhere between two extremes.
That is a wonderfully plausible lie.
Canup suggests that, to see the evil behind that plausible lie, we must make a different assumption: let us assume that in such cases, one side is innocent, honest, and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent defendant no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only lie he can tell is to falsely confess "I did it."
On the other hand, lying is nothing but good for the liar. He can declare that “I didn't do it” and accuse another of doing it; all the while the innocent person is saying “I didn't do it” and is telling the truth.
The truth - when twisted by good liars, can always make an innocent person look bad - especially if he is honest and admits that he has faults. If someone is telling the simple truth, and the other side is lying through their teeth, the basic assumption that the truth lies between the testimony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most circumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in the hands of liars.
Canup points out that, even the simple act of giving testimony under oath is useless. If a person is a liar, swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However, swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness. Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liars.
Proof is a familiar concept to those used to conventional logical thinking. However what passes for proof in cultural, social, and even legal terms often bears only a superficial resemblance to what would be considered proof by those who really use their minds to think.
For example: in formal mathematics, proof rules are established - postulates are set out and a structure is built based on the postulates and the theorem. Mathematical proof is pretty much inarguable: once a proof is accepted as true it is added to the pool of known truths.
In legal proof there is a set of rules and a theory which the prosecution presents, and attempts to prove the theory by clever argumentation rather than facts. Truth is not the objective. Getting other people to believe the theory IS the objective. However, the prosecution's theory is whatever the prosecutor believes that he can get away with based on what is known about the case, or what he can PREVENT from being known. What legal 'proof' does is serve as a structure for convincing a group of people of the guilt of a person, about whom they know nothing.
There is another significant difference: Mathematical proofs are judged by experts in the particular case who are free to study any and all information about the case. Legal 'proof' is judged by people who are guaranteed to be ignorant of the case, who are only allowed to study the information presented during the formal trial, and who are not even allowed to consult the texts for what the rules say.
Our culture is so permeated with this “legal argument” system that it extends into our daily experience: the one who is the slickest at using the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is the one who is believed. Very few people take the time to obtain hard facts by carefully studying any and all information about a situation.
What we see something here that is set up to deceive people by presenting a familiar structure which, upon examination, is a sham. And again, the advantages fall to the hands of the liars.
As Canup points out, in a courtroom, juries are prohibited by law from knowing anyone involved in the trial. If the defendant is a good person who is being set up and framed, people who know him well and who have had much opportunity to interact with him over a long period of time and observe him would have much more trouble accepting lies told about him. If the jurors knew the prosecutor and knew him to be a bullying liar, they might have trouble believing the lies he was telling. If the jurors knew the defendant, and know him to be a trouble making villain they might be more likely to convict him.
By the same standards, if a person who is guilty is accused of a crime that he DID commit, as we have seen above, it is all too easy to get off. Corrupt lawyers, ignorant "experts," and blind judges let guilty people literally get away with murder all the time.
But, none of the conditions conducive to finding the TRUTH prevail in a courtroom even if we have been brainwashed to think that we have the "best legal system in the world." It is not much different than "Trial by Ordeal," only the hot poker has been replaced by a system that works as effectively to the advantage of liars.
Here then we see the worst feature of the law: it is designed to make the world safe for evil people. In effect the law serves to take the horns away from the bulls, while leaving the lions their teeth and claws. Massive, overwhelming, advantage is placed in the hands of liars. Indeed, without the legal system insuring their safety, the world would be a much more difficult place for evil people.
The brutal truth is that the our social, cultural, and legal systems are all about making people helpless then hammering them without mercy - all the while involving everyone in the illusion that right prevails.
This is an issue that will never die. It seems impossible to convince people that private behavior cannot be predicted from public behavior. Kind, nonviolent individuals behave well in public, but so do predators, rapists, murderers, pedophiles, and COINTELPRO agents who operate largely to shape and vector “social norms,” or “official culture.”
And so, in a world run by psychopaths, it is always best to assume the worst and observe, collect observations, data, feelings. This is especially true when dealing with a public figure at a remove.
What IS true is that this Wikileaks thing has certainly taken people's minds off the Gulf. Julian timed that perfectly. Coincidence?
Added: Obviously, Julian had no control over the timing ... or did he? And he certainly has everyone's ear right now so he could easily point out to everyone that the media is making a circus out of this thing while a much bigger disaster is building due to the oil spill and the lack of appropriate reaction to that. If he loves crushing bastards so much, why isn't he putting a notice on ever Wikileaks page for people to wake up to what is happening to the planet? That there are going to be a whole lot more dead babies as a result of that than there has been from all the war-mongering of the past 50 years.
