From another thread:
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
-Theodore Dalrymple
I replied: “I need to wrote an effort-post on this – this is the issue. Truth matters, being right matters, intelligence and honesty matter. “Matter” is too weak a word, though.”
This isn’t that effort-post, in fact, I may not be able to fit what needs to be said in just one post, but this lays some groundwork towards it. The problem isn’t just that the overwhelming mass of “individuals” are liars, or psychopaths, or fools – though they often at least act like they are – it’s that their whole mentality is upside-down and backwards so that they literally can’t comprehend the reality that surrounds them, not on any level. How can this be? What did it to them? A forgotten philosopher answered the question better than anyone else I have read.
Reciprocality
(1.5 MB PDF)
The Ghost Not
Alan G. Carter
9th May 1999
Introduction
[p.168] This paper presents a deep logical error in most people’s thinking, that is introduced right at the beginning of thought, and then stays in the thinking until the conclusions are reached. The conclusions are then wrong, but when they are examined there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with them. Nor does there seem to be anything wrong with the reasoning - as people check back, each step seems to be correct. This is because the error was already in place before reasoning began. Even worse, the conclusions people reach in one area seem to match the conclusions they reach in other areas. […] The problem distorts deductive reasoning. It does not distort inductive reasoning, but it makes inductive reasoning appear inadmissible to many people who have done some deductive reasoning with the Ghost Not and turned their minds effectively inside out. […]
Most people do not usually see like artists. Instead they do something more complicated that they have subconsciously learned to do. First, the sensory data enter their heads. That bit is unavoidable. At that point they categorise what they have seen. If it is a field of wheat before them, they categorise what they have seen as a general issue field of wheat. They then put a general issue field of wheat on a kind of internal whiteboard that they keep in their minds for this very purpose. […] Why would anyone do such a thing? The reason is that they do it so as to be able to edit what they see as they make the transcription from reality to the internal whiteboard. […] So the artist uses a blank to indicate existence in his mind (whatever the universe chooses to put there), and a mark to indicate that what the universe is doing, it should be imagined to be not doing. The dyadic uses a mark to indicate that he has acknowledged the existence of something, and a void to indicate that he has not acknowledged it.[…]
Why does this sign flipping, this inverted use of the mark by conventional perceivers matter? Clearly sign flipping is unavoidable by conventional perceivers, but why does it matter? Are not the marked and unmarked states symmetrical? Might we as well say Green/Blue, True/False or Up/Down as readily as Marked/Unmarked? The answer is no, for a very remarkable reason. First, Spencer-Brown showed in “Laws of Form” that Boolean logic can be done with one symbol to denote operands and operations. True/False and Blue/Green are two valued logics, while Marked/Unmarked is one valued. Next, we must ask why we can do Boolean logic with one symbol and the answer is most remarkable - our universe is logically asymmetrical![… p.177] This is all very philosophical, but is there any practical evidence that our understanding of logic is warped even at this low level? Yes there is! If you pick up any book on electronic engineering, you will find that actual electronic switching circuits are built out of basic components called NOR gates and NAND gates. These terms mean an OR with a NOT around it, and an AND with a NOT around it. It might seem rather odd behaviour for electronic engineers to make every component with an extra layer just to invert the output, with the result that all their logical theorems will be the wrong way around - which would be inconvenient as well as cost more to manufacture. But that is not the situation - they don’t fit an extra layer at all. What nature actually provides is an operation that we call “OR with a NOT around it”, that we cannot bring ourselves to call fundamental. […]
[p. 180]This effect has very serious consequences indeed. At all times, each dyadic person must believe that their internal whiteboard is reality - otherwise the cognitive apparatus for conventional perception would not be much use. If it is reality then it must be complete - they can acknowledge no deeper reality that the whiteboard must conform to. Therefore any data not already possessed by the person is regarded by them as false, and automatically denied until they are forced to accept it by direct confrontation. Then they edit history to pretend that they have always “known” the fact. This presents an insuperable barrier to learning, and in situations where force cannot be used, can bring down major corporations employing thousands of people. Finally, a result of exclusive thinking is that it simply cannot cope with interacting causes for things. Each aspect of a dyadic’s life is divided into little discrete compartments, that are pretended to be each an exhaustive and complete understanding of its topic. This yields a situation where knowledge and hence understanding is held in isolated packets, which the dyadics will not integrate. […]
[p.181] Dyadics believe that their narratisation is real, and there is no such thing as objective reality. Therefore their principle concern is ensuring that everybody asserts that all is well, and it never occurs to them to achieve this as a side effect of all actually being well. Hence the person who attempts to improve an organisation’s safety record will be lambasted for disloyally claiming that the safety record is poor. Dictators regularly torture political prisoners until they say confessions, even though they fully intend to murder them afterwards, whatever they say.
Throughout all aspects of Ghost Not life, genuinely even so much as attempting to get something right will be abandoned in order to “show” that it is being got right. In all cases, this “showing” is entirely bogus, because the ridiculous play-acting involved does not represent a valid methodology for proving anything at all. Particularly since the results are always known by all to be false.
The keyword is denial. People trapped in the Ghost Not will deny reality, deny their denial, deny their denial of their denial, and deny their denial of their denial of their denial. They will assert that so far as they are to blame, the goods are not late, but so long as someone else is, the goods are late. They will spend hours - sometimes days - sitting in meeting rooms adding little denial clauses to their ever more complex entanglements of “saying” what things are not. Then they are unable to do anything productive, since endorsing any action in the real world would be to contradict someone or other’s false statements. Nor will they ever admit that they do not understand something. They won’t even try, since they know that what the speaker is about to say is false before he has even opened him mouth. Instead they will sit pulling peculiar smirking expressions until the person trying to get through to them has utterly exhausted himself, and then just carry on as if he hadn’t wasted his time.
Utilising Conventional Perception
The Ghost Not is bad enough, but when it emerges together with the trick of conventional perception itself, it can create total psychopaths as required. People with no consciences whatsoever, since they can do anything they like so long as they are chanting their denial of their actions as they are performing them. People take up conventional perception so they can con themselves that things that are happening actually aren’t. Before they even start their misrepresentations, their understanding is shattered by the Ghost Not. Conclusions become the exact opposite of the truth. “Deeming” - telling lies while simultaneously boasting of it and denying it - becomes a daily commonplace. With the world already inside out psychologically, conventional perception can then be used to spread an ever widening construct of pure fantasy throughout the dyadic’s entire psychological arena. Wherever the chain of reasoning reaches, false constructions drive out true ones. […]
The Observer in Physics
Dyadic consciousness involves creating a system boundary in one’s head, between one’s self and everything else. It is the barrier or distinction that flips the sign of objects dragged across it in “narratisation”. From this comes the concept of the observer in physics - a being that is omniscient with respect to the universe (as in the game show problem), yet not even attached to the space in which the universe evolves […]
The physical observer has a sociological parallel. No dyadics feel that they are actively involved in their societies (unless they are boasting of their own indescribable importance), or that they have any responsibilities within those societies since all other members are beneath their contempt. If monsters without consciences but with contemptuous smirks are committing hideous atrocities before their very eyes, they will smirk in response and explain that they themselves are not monsters - they are “observers”.
[p. 187] What is important about the internal whiteboard is that people are conditioned to see the internal whiteboard - and not the perceived reality - as “real”. Therefore it must be complete. In order to maintain the delusion, they cannot admit that there is another reality to which the internal whiteboard must conform. Therefore unknowns in the outside reality must be filled in with pure fantasy in the inner, bogus reality. And of course, the person must learn to be unable to differentiate between elements of the internal reality that bear some relationship (however shallow) with the outside, and their own fantasies. The pressure to do this is maintained by asserting that rote memorising “knowledge” indicates moral and intellectual superiority, and not so doing indicates moral and intellectual inferiority. Thus people will always make up fantasies and deny that they have done so to the extent that they even forget that they have done so. The incessant tricks that the person has to play on themselves to cover up the discrepancies between the reality up their backsides and the reality that hits them in the face become a price that they assert are not paying to maintain their delusional state. Then they go into intellectual free fall. Their “knowledge” is already “perfect”, the universe keeps saying otherwise, therefore the entire universe is beneath their contempt. […]
[p.188] When I described the Ghost Not concept to an (American) artist, he wheezed with laughter and said, "Heck yes - we call it buck-eye. Buck-eyed people never draw what is there. You’ve got to teach them to see with their eyes and made a bug-eyed face.
In the paper, the examples of Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield” shows how what artists do when perceiving and expressing the deep structure is made impossible when all particular properties of real objects and the relationships between them are deleted by narratisation.
The extraordinary way that people who are speaking from a position of ignorance feel entitled to patronisingly criticise people who do know what they are doing - as if they are educating rather than having an opportunity to be educated - is demonstrated in the example of Van Gogh’s bedroom.
