Visible Origami – March 24, 2010
You hear people all the time saying that it’s better to be honest and truthful but that doesn’t seem to bear out in the wider world. People can become very quickly outraged by honest and true speech. In the defense of this certain event we restrain our honest nature and shade our truth. Most people know what’s going on and they do a little dance and then pat themselves and each other on the back for what amounts to casual dishonesty and deceit.
Anytime I’m around other people I see it all the time. It’s mostly unconscious, this ‘go along to get along’ thing. People forge powerful reputations based on how they appear to be. A lot of them have private lives and some of them pay people to enhance the way they appear in the world and to camouflage what might upset the other hypocrites. I suspect a lot of people don’t actually know what hypocrisy is.
The dictionary says this about hypocrisy; a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess; a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude. I think it can also be defined as saying one thing and doing another. Hypocrisy is not the personal shared exposure of one’s true behavior, former and present. It’s not a public revelation by one about one’s weaknesses and shortcomings; quite the opposite in fact. However, one anonymous poster accused me of hypocrisy for my being honest about these things. What this is, is a no win situation.
I suppose I should apologize for being honest and truthful. I should keep my private life private and manifest a stable and consistent posture, saying all the right things and working that whitened sepulcher thing. I thought I had good reason for doing otherwise because it presents the clear evidence that one is not better than you. I thought that was desirable for some reason but it appears to be the reverse.
Talking about politics and religion is sure to cause an argument and that is why many intelligent and aware souls avoid talking about them. With religion and politics, a good argument can be made for just about any point of view and the same applies to philosophy which is why there are so many of them. There are a lot of religions and political points of view as well. Within the major groups there are literally hundreds of splinter groups covering all of the extremes and middle ground.
I believe it to be true that religion has less to do with God than it does with operating a business. Politics has much less to do with social equity and helping people than it does with self-advancement and deals with the devil. Philosophies are endlessly adjusted to incorporate personal preferences. One changes their philosophy to suit the justification of their behavior instead of the other way around. Sure, sometimes people adjust their behavior to suit the philosophy but this often gets them ostracized and marginalized because they’re not playing the game and they make everyone else look bad, which is how it should be but no one likes it.
We live in a time of rampant alcoholism and prescription drug addiction. We also live in a time of epidemic casual sex, which now regularly happens as soon as puberty arrives if not before. We live in a time where the rich and the powerful take full advantage of this and they use and trade young people like baseball cards. They’re a commodity and the ability to indulge without fear of consequence is a sign that you have arrived. It’s just another perk like huge bonuses and not having to pay any taxes.
Hypocrites see nothing wrong with the use of alcohol and prescription drugs but they are experts on the dangers of illegal drugs. Apparently they do not know that prescription drugs kill far, far more people than illegal drugs and that alcohol kills more people in a year than illegal drugs do in a century or more. One of the reasons that certain drugs are illegal is because they open your eyes to what’s going on. Alcohol and prescription drugs do the opposite. Social controllers at the political and religious level demand suppression of the use of illegal drugs because they do not want people thinking outside the box. There’s no argument that can be given to continue to make marijuana illegal when alcohol and tobacco are not. Some illegal drugs are definitely not good for you and you’ll get no argument from me about them.
Enormous sums are spent to make war on people who can barely defend themselves while the bare minimum is spent on bettering the lives of the people living in the countries that make the wars. Money is cynically given to vested interests under the guise of helping people who have to live in these bombed out wastelands but it never gets to them The level of hypocrisy among our political and religious leaders is staggering. It’s off the charts.
People engaging in all manner of non mainstream sexual activities have armies of lawyers who rush in wherever there is a complaint about unfair practices, like the girl in Mississippi who wanted to take another girl to a prom. Mississippi is not New York City where anything goes. Community standards have a right to be upheld and certain parts of the country have the right to maintain them according to the wishes of the majority. There’s a lot of sophistry at work.
Some would say that people have the right to be themselves wherever they are. I don’t agree with that. My feeling is that you move to where you are tolerated and don’t make waves until you’re old enough to do so. I’m sure all sorts of people have arguments against this but I think it is common sense more than anything else and you can’t legislate morality in either direction. It doesn’t work, period. Besides the hidden agenda on the part of those who are trying to force certain behaviors on every community, there is no way to make everyone equal without making a lot of other people unequal. People have the right to demand certain standards in their communities and if you don’t like, hit the road. There are plenty of places you can go and be among your peers. Some people just like noise and attention. There’s also money in it. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
People fall in love with you when you tell them what they want to hear. They fall right out of love with you when you don’t. As our awareness expands, so does our area of influence. The stars in the sky were once individuals like you and I. These stars are not close together and they shine alone. The rulership of our sun changes every three to four hundred million years. I think its somewhere around that number. What is possible for us is much more than we suspect but mostly we are content to behave in ways that beasts are not inclined to do. We have unlimited potential but we do not rise to it. We squander a most precious human birth and there’s no telling where we will wind up later on. We place terrible limits upon ourselves in order to conform to a sick system and enjoy a common fellowship in darkness. We tolerate and support the most heinous acts and call it patriotism. For some reason I am not inclined to accept this.
Certainly it is politically expedient to get behind all the self-indulgent excesses of everyone and call it freedom when it’s no more than license. Telling the truth pisses people off because you are messing with their income and power structure. Every interest group just wants to be more powerful than the others. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about money, influence and power.
Trying to be honest and truthful besmirches one’s reputation and makes them a target so maybe it’s better not to say anything because, sooner or later, you are going to run afoul of money, influence and power. It might be your job for awhile but it’s no walk in the park; you just begin to feel tarnished by the prevailing, general misconceptions about the meaning of life. The amount of people walking a fine line with their eyes on the upward road has always been a very small minority. Many of them are celebrated once they are gone but an unwelcome and general pain in the ass while they are still around.
It’s not easy to know what to do and what to say. It’s all trial and error. We just hope we will be guided and have to good sense to reach for an understanding of that guidance. We’re at a critical point in history and a critical point in our own history as well. I don’t know what else to say so I will say no more.
Something Good (is coming soon)
http://lesvisible.blogspot.com/2010/03/cost-of-truth-and-honesty-can-be-severe.html
Last updated 26/03/2010
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