10 lies - 8 Listed

I guess for starters I will explain the list of 10 lies that only had 8.

Part of the problem with the education in schools is that they tell you that you are about to learn about a certain topic. The problem is, they have a habit of leaving key, crucial information about most topics out of the lesson, regardless of what outside influence provided them the incentive to do so.

Moving on to the second most recent post of mine, the speech by the professor informing his graduating class that in fact, contrary to what they may have been raised to believe - they are not special. I have long tried to communicate this point to those around me. It is not a generational problem, it is a cultural one. There are people just as self-important at 90 years old as someone in their teenage years. We live in a culture of self-importance in the USA. We are told we are special, that we are unique. We are (usually) raised in a religion to believe that we have an immortal soul which deserves an afterlife in paradise. We are raised to think that somehow our lives are important, and that we hold value to the rest of the world.

The problem is, none of that fucking shit is true. Do you know what happens when someone dies? If they are really important, they get a public funeral, and there are a few news stories about them. An insignificantly small group of people morns for their loss and then the world moves on in its regular process on the steam-train to mediocrity and conformity. If your average, you MAYBE have a funeral with a few people who cared about you enough in life to put you in a wood box where you can rot and decay. The rest of the people there are only there because a friend or family member dragged them along and they really don't want to fucking be there to begin with. Usually what happens, is you die, and someone who you owe money too finds you, and calls an ambulance to come pick you up. They take you to a morge, where you are put in what looks like a big filing cabnit, and pushed into a hole in the wall. Eventually, someone comes to pick you up and either cremates you, or puts you in an unmarked hole in the ground...maybe youll even be lucky enough to be cut open for some fucking science project.

As for being special, you can be the most special worker at your minimum wage job you can possibly be, because the reality is most people in the USA work at poverty wage jobs where creative spirit and individuality are discouraged and punished. You eventually come to realize you are the same fucking worthless decomposing matter as all the worthless shit around you, and that nobody really cares about how special you think you are, because you sure as shit aren't special to them or the rest of the world. Most people upon realizing them, go into a total meltdown when they realize the world doesn't give a single fuck about them, much less think of them as a god like mommy and daddy raised them to believe. Usually they end up with some kind of mental health diagnosis, like Bi-Polar or Schizophrenia. Some just decide to swallow the barrel of a gun.

Then there are the special kind of people that believe in an afterlife. They think somehow, their lives are SO important and special and meaningful, that the universe simply cant continue to go on without them. They believe that some magical sky wizard will swoop down and take their imaginary soul which cant be found by any scientific procedure, and cant be found in an autopsy, and take them to a magical land where they have everything they could ever want, and nothing ever goes wrong for all eternity. The fucking audacity of these people to think that they are so important, that the universe can't exist without them is just short of being beyond my ability to comprehend. On top of this, these people believe that Humans are the only life form on the planet, on the only planet in the entire universe to have this supreme fucking right to live for eternity.

We are also indoctrinated to believe from birth, that we have to do what others ask us to. We have to conform, we have to fit in, we have to have the goddamn white picket house with the two snot-nosed kids and the soul crushing job that pays barely enough to live off of.

And that's about all I have to say for now.

So was there a point when you honestly believed any of those lies?

Also, this is to everyone: Would you rather live in a world where you are being lied to over and over again or in one where you could never tell whether you are?

I was never raised to believe any of this and I only know three people personally who were. Of course three is still three too many, but suffice it to say that this is not a global phenomenon. Besides, nowadays there is global communication, and education, globally speaking, is better than it was ever before. So for what it's worth, there is still hope and not completely unfounded hope either.

Now, on the other hand, there will always remain the selfish, the dumb and the wicked, and they will never quite become the minority we wish them to be until the day they begin annihilating each other, for, apparently, as much as we try to interbreed with them, the evil doesn't really wash away; nor does the stupid. However, so it seems to me, the age of their dominance has been over for a while now and our age has come and it is blooming still and we are, indeed, long past the point of no return in this, and we will, rest assured, keep dragging them with us, kicking and screaming though they feel they must be.

wow. Eugenics are making a comeback.

I believe attitude is key, and you really are worthless (to yourself and others) if that's what you believe.
I hope that, instead of believing all I do is worth nothing and therefore not trying, what I do will someday have an effect, even if nobody knows it was down to me.

Because I can only thank a post once, I'm going to re post this and bold the hell out of it.

Edan wrote: I believe attitude is key, and you really are worthless (to yourself and others) if that's what you believe.
I hope that, instead of believing all I do is worth nothing and therefore not trying, what I do will someday have an effect, even if nobody knows it was down to me.

as for the list. I was never taught any of those things. But then, what we learn is also filtered by perspective.

also, if you arent a special snowflake, then havent you already conformed to sameness and mediocrity? Or is the conformity in being just as special as everyone else.

Kohadre wrote: Do you know what happens when someone dies? If they are really important, they get a public funeral, and there are a few news stories about them. An insignificantly small group of people morns for their loss and then the world moves on in its regular process on the steam-train to mediocrity and conformity. If your average, you MAYBE have a funeral with a few people who cared about you enough in life to put you in a wood box where you can rot and decay. The rest of the people there are only there because a friend or family member dragged them along and they really don't want to fucking be there to begin with. Usually what happens, is you die, and someone who you owe money too finds you, and calls an ambulance to come pick you up. They take you to a morge, where you are put in what looks like a big filing cabnit, and pushed into a hole in the wall. Eventually, someone comes to pick you up and either cremates you, or puts you in an unmarked hole in the ground...maybe youll even be lucky enough to be cut open for some fucking science project.

I never got along with my father, firstly I never liked him, just putting that out there. It wasn't until my father died that I really got to really know the man. So many people showed up, there wasn't much room left in the funeral home. I spoke with dozens and dozens of people, most of them worked with my father over a 200 square mile radius. Most of the people who showed did not live anywhere close by. They came from Louisville, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. Not one had a bad thing to say about the man, (who would, it's visitation before the funeral right). Point is, the majority of all of these people I had never met before drove well out of their way to come and say their last respects, no one dragged them there. He earned their respect, as chief electrician, boss, and friend. I could see it in their eyes.

We are also indoctrinated to believe from birth, that we have to do what others ask us to. We have to conform, we have to fit in, we have to have the goddamn white picket house with the two snot-nosed kids and the soul crushing job that pays barely enough to live off of.

I'm not the greatest with words, this song does it better than I ever could...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GimNm_PKtYM

Don't let life make you bitter Kohadre. If you dislike something, be a force for change, cause bitching doesn't get shit accomplished...

awesome insight. I'll use this when I am trying to not lie. Trying to embrace more of my Jedi self.

I thought this was a private conversation... Oh well.. :laugh:

In regards to your thoughts about crucial information being left out: This is why I tend to think less and less about "Truth" (emphasis on the capital "T" in Truth) and focus on experiential truth while trying to allow room for the experiential truths of others. I presume that reality is constructed concept that has no actuality and that each individual has their own reality which may coincide with others' reality on several axes but still not be the same. Schools, therefore, cannot give you an objective reality which to understand the whole experience of all of human kind but rather can give you fragmentary interpretations of other peoples' experiential truth. Some of it is also much more politically motivated than mere inability to encompass experiences of all people, some of it is down-right lies and creative gloss to dismiss or completely deny certain ugly truths (particularly with history).

Your assessment, while not being wholly inaccurate, seems to be only one perspective. Yeah, Americans have a lot of self-importance but I think that also comes from a sense of individualism as it's filtered through capitalism and translated back as "everyone for themselves, survival of the fittest!" This kind of thinking produces the sort of hubris and and inflated sense of self that you seem to be characterizing. Your point seems to be a little heavy-handed with cynicism and, perhaps bitter contempt? Furthermore, I know for a fact that this is not how all Americans think and view themselves. This isn't even particularly an American view of the self so much as it is a culturally white view of the self. My teaching master, Alan, mentioned in a thread on funeral rites that funerals are largely for the living. Funerals give people a sense of closure with the individual who had died. While some people might see themselves as deserving of such a funeral procession, that's not really the functional purpose of funeral. Nobody gets to witness their own funeral (that I know of) and therefore it is moot whether your body was thrown in a dumpster or stowed in a diamond studded casket and placed in the ground beside the bones of distinguished people in history.

Your statements about people working in minimum wage jobs losing their individuality and creativity seems as odds with your previous statements about the myth of being unique. It is my observation that a lot of people who work minimum wage jobs to make a living don't do those jobs because they they look for fulfillment, but rather that they use the money from those jobs to continue doing what it is that does fulfill them and given them a sense of self. Certainly there are people who aspire to greatness at low or minimum wage jobs and feel their dreams and hopes crushed, but that's an entirely different experience that doesn't necessarily have correlation or causation from or to poverty. Also, as someone who is studying psychology I can say with some confidence that that's not how diagnoses work and I resent your oversimplification of mental illness to a flippant stress-induced psychosis.

As for your characterization regarding the afterlife, ok, but is this what you think about the afterlife? How do you know whether there is an afterlife? You speak with such certainty yet I wonder what grounds you have for making these claims. Does your inability to comprehend an afterlife necessarily mean it cannot and therefore does not exist? By this logic, you place your own beliefs above the historical and cultural traditions of humans dating back as far as written history goes. You think you know better than all of humanity? Who's supposed to be the full of self-importance and false sense of uniqueness again? I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say that when I believed in an afterlife (I no longer do) it wasn't about my special entitlement or anything like that. At that time, the thought was that temporal, corporeal life was a miserable existence full of pain and sorrow; the afterlife was sort of place of rest and perfect communion with divine. In a sense, the afterlife was for the soul was death was for the body: a final resting place.

I believe it's true that we are taught an excessive amount of obedience to authority that is wholly undeserved and often times unsuited, but again this feels out of place with the rest of your statement. Isn't this sense of "we shouldn't have to do what we're told" borne out of sense of self being greater than others or the wisdom of those who have come before us and bestowed us with an ideal way of living? I certainly don't think we should obey authority or go along with anything we're told to do without asking why we are being told to do it and reflection after the fact. The thing is, if our attitude is in the words of Zack de la Rocha, "F--- YOU, I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME" then we're going to ostracize people before even allowing for the possibility that some people will actually agree with you and want to foster your desire for alternative ways of living. When being told to do something that you absolutely don't want to do, the difference between "f--- you" and "No, thank you" is huge.

Those are my thoughts in response to what you said. Hopefully I haven't put you off too much that we can't have a discussion.