Posted on 06/09/2020 6:45:47 AM PDT by SJackson
For thousands of years, in the East no less than in the West, lovers of wisdom devised whole worldviews (usually called “philosophies”) rooted, fundamentally, in the distinction between reality and mere appearance.
For all of their differences, these traditions concurred with one another in the belief that most people choose to be deluded rather than reckon with the world as it is.
Stories of this human condition abound. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is probably the most prominent to come from the ancient world. In more recent times, films like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky have communicated the same idea.
Of course, from the perspective of the world’s two billion or so Christians, the mockery, ostracism, abandonment, betrayal, and violence to which Truth was subjected when it “assumed flesh and dwelt among us” two millennia ago will forever serve as the penultimate expression of the average person’s preference for delusion over reality.
Christianity crystallizes for us another insight, one shared by all of the ancients: The willingness to embrace truth, reality, is, ultimately, the willingness to embrace virtue.
Socrates famously remarks: “To know the good is to do the good.”
Jesus proclaims Himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” the Savior of the human race.
Hinduism maintains that when people realize that what they’ve always assumed is real is only just “maya” (illusion), then they’ll recognize their true selves, namely, that they are God.
For the Buddha (“Awakened One”), emancipation from illusion requires recognition of the Four Noble Truths, the last of which prescribes the Eight-Fold Path, a set of moral prescriptions that promises to result in Enlightenment.
This overall theme is universal.
If any was ever needed, contemporary America is the proof that the more things have changed over the span of thousands of years, the more they have remained the same.
The COVID-19 Scare, of course, takes the prize for this year’s Matrix Award. The “novel” virus, as some of us have always known, has never been anything at all like the Plague that the prisoners in the bottom of the Cave were led to believe it was.
But as for the Lifetime Matrix Award, the rightful recipient of it belongs to the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC). No virus is going to upstage it!
The morality tale of perpetually oppressive whites (symbolized by perpetually brutal police forces) and perpetually oppressed, always innocent blacks (symbolized by criminal suspects in police custody) has just been invigorated by the response to the killing of George Floyd in ways that it hasn’t enjoyed in some time.
If this was some fiction that never left the parameters of the inside of a person’s skull, then we could safely put it to one side. The problem, however, is that masses of people (black, white, and other, and for reasons that I’ll delve into at another time) confuse this illusion with reality. Yet the latter is something else entirely.
The authors of the most comprehensive study to date on the subject of police brutality and race have concluded that white police officers are no more likely than black and Hispanic officers to shoot minority civilians.
Up to this juncture (2015), “databases of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) [have] lack[ed] details about officers” (emphasis added). Yet this information is critical, for without it, the conventional wisdom that “racism” is to blame for fatal police shootings involving non-white suspects is unsustainable.
In determining whether there truly exists racial disparities vis-à-vis police shootings, this study also has the virtue of circumventing “the benchmark debate” (the debate over whether, say, the standard should be the numbers of whites and non-whites shot by police relative to their respective numbers in the overall population; the absolute numbers of whites and non-whites shot by police; or the numbers of white and non-whites shot by police relative to the numbers of white and non-white criminal suspects).
Rather, the authors, by using detailed information concerning officers, predict the race of civilians fatally shot. Their verdict:
“As the proportion of Black or Hispanic officers…increases, a person shot is more likely to be Black or Hispanic than White, a disparity explained by county demographics [.]”
To repeat: The authors found “no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings, when focused on different subtypes of shootings [.]”
The authors of this study note the scientific worthlessness of the dominant approach that focuses only on the proportional representation of whites and blacks relative to their respective numbers in the population. It “makes the strong assumption that White and Black civilians have equal exposure to these situations that result in FOIS [Fatal-Officer-Involve-Shootings].”
They don’t.
And when, since “the majority of FOIS involve armed civilians,” researchers have used “race-specific violent crime as a benchmark,” “anti-Black disparities in FOIS disappear or even reverse” (emphasis added). (A select sample of literature substantiating this point can be found here, here, here, and here.)
So, when measured according to race-specific violent crime, there are not only no “anti-Black disparities;” whites of the same description are fatally shot by police at a disproportionately higher rate.
White police officers are most emphatically not roaming the countryside in search of unassuming black people to kill.
Even among the four officers involved in the death of George Floyd, half were “people of color.” J. Alexander Keung looks like he may even be a light-complexioned black person.
The point, though, is that even the story of the hour, that which has been rendered into a worldwide symbol of the anti-black “racism” of America’s police forces, has cracks in it as half of the officers charged with this alleged act of “racism” are not white.
Yet regardless of the truth, most people will continue to inhabit Plato’s Cave of darkness. As always, and admittedly for different reasons, they prefer the comfort of the Matrix to the hardiness of reality.
* * *
Photo credit: 4edges at Wikimedia Commons
The problem nobody may speak of, is that there is an ignorant, low IQ, crime ridden, minority, communist lead underclass in America. You cannot police them because two generations of kids have been educated to despise everything our republic was built on and now they are their loudest supporters.
Most of the rioters have been under 30 whites.
So as I see it, you cannot effectively police them anymore, and you cannot live near them.
Prepare your life accordingly.
That allegory always amazed me as it has described as well as possible (using 5th century B.C. knowledge and vocabulary) what we have created for ourselves with television and the “world wide web”. Not reality, but “virtual” reality.
You’re right Dr. Sivana, and the allegory goes further in discussing the difficulty faced by those trying to communicate light and reality to those still in the cave. It is so difficult to explain the truth to those steeped in illusion.
he should have kept to Plato and not gone to comparing religions.
I stopped reading.
He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him: it was a desire to kill. The desire was not directed at the unknown thug who had sent a bullet through the boy's body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to do it, but at the boy's teachers who had delivered him, disarmed, to the thug's gun, at the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care. Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, who had obeyed with a zealot's fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs, then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal. He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly, yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think. From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. "Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!" "Who are you to think? It's so, because I say so!" "Don't argue, obey!" "Don't try to understand, believe!" "Don't rebel, adjust!" "Don't stand out, belong!" "Don't struggle, compromise!" "Your heart is more important than your mind!" "Who are you to know? Your parents know best!" "Who are you to know? Society knows best!" "Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!" "Who are you to object? All values are relative!" "Who are you to want to escape a thug's bullet? That's only a personal prejudice!" Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival, yet that was what they did to their children. Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest, and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings. - Ayn Rand
Why not print this up and pass around in your precinct
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The democrat controlled media deliberate miss portraying the six foot seven inch 200 plus pound Floyd as an innocent black who was being forceably restrained because he was black not because he was resisting arrest.When He was legitimately arrested for passing a counterfeit $20 dollar bill he was resisting arrest and was a threat if not secured. But the media was not mentioning his size or reporting that Floyd was removed from a squad car because he was acting up under the influence of drugs and also later was discovered to have COVID 19. Which suggests his physical condition may have led to his death which the media turned into a murder change and a charge of serious abuse by police because of police efforts that were tried to get him who under control. Check out
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3853159/posts
Further confirmation here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3850910/posts Floyd on drugs
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3851693/posts (confirm had covid19)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3852373/posts (2 cops were trainees)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3852275/posts#16 neck hold use world wide
This posting has comments that reveals that both the arresting officer and Floyd knew each other and had worked together in bar security
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3851100/posts
The results of politically induced miss reporting incidents where blacks have resisted legitimate arrest began to be used earlier during and after the post Zimmmerman trial, then on to the Ferguson episode. Obama’s abuse of the “Bully Pulpit” which seemed to promote resistance to legitimate arrest led to black gangs attacking non blacks found innocently traversing black neighborhoods and to a score of murders or life changing injuries and later attacks of theft and vandalism on local businesses as well as attacks and murders of police officers during that period
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