And there is a common denominator in these: you can call it sabotaging our attention, you can call it effect. If you realize that one the vital qualities of each individual is the ability to confront, then what all of our faults and their exploiters have in common is undermining our confront, our poise: distracting, make one lose one’s concentration, spoiling, blocking, fixating, dispersing, turning away our attention. If you have ascertained that the more one is cause and the better off everything will be, then what all of our faults have in common – and basically are – is that they make us more effect. And the worse our faults, the more we’re effect. To a point of not getting through. And beyond.

So let’s brush up on some humanoid faults, as almost everything depends on whether we can manage to raise a bit above the cage they form. And, by the way, the “humanoid” adjective simply means such faults aren’t worth any better title. I refuse to label them “human” as this opens the door to their tolerance, which is exactly what we must not do, instead of facing them for what they are: the bars of our cages, the nails in our coffins.

We’re incoherent:

We behave more like an incoherent composite cluster rather than like a coherent unit. A block of flats whose inhabitants know each other very little. How often have we seriously wondered whether we were dealing with the same individual every time – or if there even were an individual worth the name at all within that humanoid compound? Regardless of how indulgent we are in explaining away this unaware multiplicity as “human”, it may be worth mentioning it first here because it supports many other faults: the less we are a coherent unit, the less we’re aware of the faults in each inhabitant of our cluster.

We’re wiseacres:

The quality of our judgement is based on the quality of our information, and we take way too much for granted that our information is true, unbiased, complete, exhaustive, and so we don’t care to inspect and verify it and fill the gaps. And we’re so arrogant that we are not aware of it: we overestimate ourselves and we are not aware of doing it, in a vicious circle. Consequently our opinions and our vote are manipulated by controlling what information we’re fed, and we're fed intentionally, deliberately and carefully incomplete, altered, twisted information, if not utterly false.

Socrates knew he did not know, we do not know that we don’t know, because we think we know. If you surveyed the most ignorant forms of life on earth, such as a mouse or a humanoid, you would find the most amazing certainty of knowing everything there is, has been and ever will be to know. They say the devil hides in the details; he definitely relies on the fact that the least we know the more we’re convinced that we know better.
Sounds obvious, but it’s not that obvious: we may be aware that we overestimate ourselves, but hardly we can be aware of how much, how deeply, how intimately, how specifically and in what tiny detail level. We think that we have enough information: we think that that information is sound, true, realistic, complete, accurate; we think that that information is sound because we think we dug it out of a free, objective, unbiased, exhaustive quest; we think we dug it out on our own; and we think that we are wise enough to evaluate it equally well.
We fall by the book into the “know best” trap: the less one knows, the more one “knows best”.
Disheartening like thinking of the future while watching a teenager whose ingenuous arrogance prevents him from listening and sifting out and thus traps him into being unable to learn: where would the world be now if each generation were smart enough to resume from what the previous one reached, instead of wasting the most of the endeavours of both in reinventing the wheel?

It’s not that we are hopelessly dull. It’s that we take for granted and we don’t care to inspect and test. Our idea of “thoroughly” is not even remotely close to what is really needed to be effective. We do have the faculties; we just don’t decide to use them hard and painstakingly enough. The quality of our judgement is not at stake, at least not as much as the quality of our information is.
The quality of judgement cannot be better than the quality of the information it is based upon; proof being the change of evaluation following the change in knowledge. And the distance between the quantity and quality of the information fed to us and the full and detailed truth – that is, the information actually needed to know, understand and evaluate what’s really going on – is enormous.
But if the quality of our information is poor, well, the quality of our willingness to seek, inspect and test is far worse; the point is we are passive, not active: we buy what we’re fed and we’re not aware of not knowing. As a result, our opinion, our judgement, our vote are controllable by controlling our information – and controlled they are.
This fault is treasured by the mainstream media; there is a thing called second level censorship: controlling what is fed to you, rather than your opinions about it. This treasure is the loot of the wars where the control of the media and parliamentary agendas is at stake. The winners of these wars win the power to manipulate us by controlling what will be fed to us and to parliaments; a citizen or a parliament whose time and attention are absorbed by an issue is thus effectively diverted from another issue.

We’re unquestioning:

That is, not only we’re not watchful of gaps, of what we’re not fed; we’re not watchful of what we’re fed too. This fault has to do with the second facet of information: is what we’re fed verifiable? We lack the approach of detecting and discerning what is verifiable from what is not: what is specific from what is undefined.

Ignore the rhetoric stimulating your emotions: that is used as a cover and you’re looking through it now; is what you’re being told specific and detailed enough so that you can go and assess it? One thing is saying, “I’m the champion of this and that…” – a statement that hides behind its rhetoric the fact that it is vague and generic and thus there is nothing in it that can be verified. Quite another thing is saying, “On day x in place y I signed the so and so law which reads: under the so and so circumstance the so and so proviso applies so that this and that…” – now, regardless of any rhetoric and emotional appeal there may be, you do have details specific enough that you can go and check whether or not that person on day x in place y signed the so and so law which reads so and so, etc. etc.
Exploiting this fault, politicians and the alike can – and do – go on unchecked using on stage vague generalizations that mean nothing and winning our consensus on the basis of that nothingness, while in the backstage they’re free to keep on supporting quite the contrary undisturbed.

But it can even get quite worse than that, too, and on an even more basic level: communication, which is sometimes made of questions and answers. Whether people answer or evade questions is definitely a telling study in itself; exercise yourself in being fully aware of each exact question asked, and then see whether that exact question got answered or not – “exact” being the key word here. Do “…”, “Why do you ask me that?”, “Go to hell.”, “it’s late!”, “I had a watch once …”, “Why don’t you just go and buy a watch?”, “I expected you to ask me about time …”, “If only all of us could have more time …”, “Blah, blah, blah …” answer “What time is it?” Well, have fun in carrying out this study on politicians: you’ll discover they’d rather get executed by a firing squad than answer a question.

We’re not evaluative:

We lack both the approach and the alertness of detecting bias in the information. And bias is detectable in what, when, how, etc.: what parts of the information are provided or withheld, why it is given now, how it is presented, etc. Instead, we’re prone to judge the book by its cover: the way they present us something determines the merit of our evaluation. We’d reject the value of pi from a tramp and treasure the same value from an anchor, instead of just putting the datum itself to the test, in both cases in the same way.
But there’s no limit to our inanity, and we even get to the incredible point of condoning a criminal trick instead of jumping at the throat of whoever dares to commit it: when someone is fraudulently passing off as ascertained what ascertained is not at all in the first place we don’t even realize it. Someone presents us point A as an implicit premise of point B, and we take point A for granted without even realizing it is point A that still has to be demonstrated true in the first place.
As a result, the conquerors of mainstream media and political and public agendas present intentionally scarce, and selected, and biased, and cleverly packaged information; and we enable them to run a 2nd level censorship: we can have whatever opinion, but we are not aware someone is deciding what we can have an opinion about, and what we’ll be kept in the dark about. Bias in package is a science in itself, and consequently it is a dire sin to weigh up the package and be persuaded of having weighed up the contents.

We’re impatient:

We apparently favour swiftness over exactness, which may be subject to discussion, as both have advantages and there are cases where either one is preferable. But the truth is quite different: we just can't stay there without reacting long enough to be able to listen, to observe, to think, to discern, to realize, to understand; we just can’t face circumstances, things, people, ideas, with the needed poise without feeling some kind of increasing pressure commanding us to blow up as a means to escape it.

As if the current were too high for us to bear and our fuses blew, causing a discharge to unleash through our faculties; a discharge of our inability to master ourselves. If we stare a humanoid down for too long, the assumed reaction will be, “The hell you want? Hell you looking at?” Indeed, scholars of animal behaviour tell us not to stare animals down as they are going to take it as a challenge, in that the border of animal awareness is roughly the defence of their territory or dominant role.

A human being, as an entity not just aware, but also aware to be aware, has countless more reasons for staring, not least pondering, enjoying, or just plain being there comfortably, and this as the very first requisite to be cause instead of effect and consequently get anywhere at all. A human being is aware to be aware, and is cause; a humanoid behaves like an animal, and is effect. Better underline it: the vital requisite to get somewhere is being cause instead of effect, known as confront, and confronting is the ability to just be there comfortably, observing without reacting, in order to act as needed; confronting is not acting whatever, confront is perfect observation and action as needed and as cause, not as effect.
There are many ways we can blow our fuses, but probably all classifiable under either attacking, fleeing, avoiding, ignoring, succumbing. Instead of just confronting.

Whatever the type of fuse, this is the point: we actually favour escaping the pressure rather than mastering it. And when one is hasty, hurried, impatient, to say that the information one’s opinions and decisions are based upon is coarse, is but a delicate euphemism; the obvious results are those of groping in the dark in a cutting edged world based on exactness: those Wilhelm Tell would expect for his son’s head just underneath the apple he is aiming at, should he give in to this “impatience”.

Basically, truth is our confront goes out. And you can observe how this is going to get us in trouble when you consider it from the point of view of what’s been said quite to the contrary: that the way out is more confronting, and the way to the bottom is less confronting, always and with no exceptions.

At which point it is important to clarify what confront is exactly, due to a key misunderstanding here that may let the whole thing go awry. The comparison between a normal car and a sportscar comes handy to explain it. Lower ride, stiffer suspensions, wider tires and more direct, sensitive and precise controls allow the sportscar to run faster before losing control; as a result on the same track at the same speed the normal car has to either slow down or crash, while the sportscar can handle it and even find art, pleasure and fun in it. What is the sportscar receiving from the track, the speed, the environment, corner after corner, moment by moment? Stresses: a number of sudden, strong, varied, partly unpredictable, stresses. And how is it responding, corner after corner, moment by moment, exactly? Not by anger, excitement, aggressiveness. Nor by apathy, overwhelm, surrender. But by keeping its poise, clear thinking, steadiness. In other words, the sportscar gets through because it has higher limits of cause before being pushed into effect, and it achieves this by its greater self−control.
This is the key misunderstood: again, confronting does not merely mean impulsively attacking anyhow; confronting means maintaining a perfect self−control so as to observe, decide and act – or don’t act – for the best, whatever the observation, decision, action or non−action needed. Confront is not only the courage of facing the situation and doing something about it; it is that plus staying cause, overcoming any attempt to make us effect, in order to observe the situation as it actually is, and to decide and act as actually required, as being effect means getting unwittingly biased away from the solution.

Here the sportscar example also comes handy to add that this is an ability and as such it has to be developed and learned and trained and practiced: developing a sportscar requires application in both thought and action – it takes engineering, workshop work, track testing, and much practicing into a fine art. You may have heard the most basic fine art of driving being called “dérapage”, “countersteer”, “driving sideways”, “drifting”… this fine art originates from one’s ability to flawlessly confront and thus master throttle and steer, as opposed to the inclination to abandon oneself to reacting and thus end up spinning.

In other words, once again, all one develops and trains is towards what? A shift from effect to cause, from so−called “instinctive”, “natural” reaction to alert and intentional action. Re−acting is being effect: something is cause over us, in that it pushes a button in ourselves – cause – and we jump up on cue – effect – one time or a million times, doesn’t make any difference. Acting is being cause, instead: it is us who observe, decide, act – cause – and every single time there is a factor between the input, the information we observe, and the output, the action we take, and that factor is an active one: us.
And that “every single time” must not be taken lightly. Due to our being quantitative plus impatient, repetition does have a dark side for us, as it can be used to defeat our alertness. A sportscar driver must remain fully alert always – every lap, every curve, every second: every time he takes the same curve, he takes it as if it was the first time, the first curve in the whole universe and history, in a sense, while treasuring every previous experience; nothing mechanical, nothing taken for granted.

This steady alertness is the exact opposite of the aim that every manipulator has in mind for us: we are a resource they want to exploit, so their first target is disengaging our self−control, and their second target is making us controllable by whoever holds the remote control, because their third target is using us, which means let us perform on cue any re−action they deem fit to increase their power and worsen our condition.

Particularly, one’s ability to maintain one’s alertness, self−possession, confront, stands as the watershed between the unknowing victim and the deliberate oppressor, and more generally and precisely between the potential trouble source and the suppressive. Because basically it could be said that the suppressive is successful in turning others into potential trouble sources because he or she has higher limits than his or her victims do: the suppressive can keep his or her own self−possession while he or she secretly builds up the pressure against the victims until they loose theirs and blow their fuses. We may also call this ability that to resist under torture: how strong you are is measured by how high is the level you can resist without losing your fully present and aware self; and when one is subject to oppression, to covert or overt suppression, that is a first requisite of any chance to overthrow it, defeat it, get out from underneath it.

Ever noticed a certain pressure in our current society that promotes being "instinctive"? What is that so−called "instinct": is it being either precognitive or impatient? There indeed is an area of awareness and knowledge that anticipates things and the objective contact with them, and it is quite worth consideration, but there is also what I've labelled here "impatience"; so which is which? What is the case, each time? There is some difference, after all, between just knowing something true regardless of communicating with it, and being unable to just be there and communicate. Furthermore, one is likely to wreck the other: the more one is impatient, the less one is self−aware. So I invite you to keep under scrutiny all instances of "instinctive is beautiful" and look inside and behind each one as painstakingly as their social impact is high: is it inviting us closer to the exit or deeper in the maze?

We’re coarse:

Inclined to crudity and refractory to sharpness, we stubbornly favour the simplistic over the detailed. Suppose something dangerous is moving close to us in the dark, and the only light available is a strobe one; our fate depends inexorably on the strobe speed: too slow the strobe, too poor and scarce our information, too few our chances. I previously brought to your attention that all answers are basically simple; well, this is totally different. Woe betide he who mistakes sloppiness in method for simplicity in result. When we observe something, it’s as if we shot a series of pictures of it – and each picture, motionless and two−dimensional, is but a distant approximation of the actual three−dimensional and moving thing. So, when we and that thing will be face to face, we’d better have had and studied the highest possible number of pictures of it, or else. Predictably enough, instead, we claim the authority to dictate the fates of people and issues on the solid grounds of a couple of passport−sized photos of theirs.

In the same frame of mind is repetition of inspection. Repetita iuvant, repetitions are beneficial, the Romans said. And you can test its truthfulness for both its uses: to clarify or to manipulate. I’m touching on manipulation in another paragraph, so suffice to say here that as to clarification you just have to try and test: pick up whatever you want and repeatedly observe, inspect and study it, and then notice if in the process you find more and more understanding and previously unnoticed facets and details. Once done, next comes repeating it with something else, and then with something else, until you have an ample enough statistical base on which you can conclusively say whether sharpness in observation is a useful and functional virtue universally. In light of all this, consider how the more the range of colours we’re capable to detect shrinks towards black and white, the easier the task of those aiming at shifting us from self−control to remote control.

We’re quantitative:

There’s an old Lombard saying, “Chi vusa püsée la vàca l’è sua.” It literally means, “He who screams loudest the cow is his.” Or, in more explicit terms, “He who screams loudest wins the ownership of the cow in people’s eyes.” For anyone to get anywhere, two ingredients are vital: intelligence and force. Both of them are vital, which means that, lacking either one, one is going nowhere. And between intelligence and force we favour – or rather succumb to – force. We, beings made of quality, abdicate to the world, made of quantity. If there’s something we’d deserve damnation for, well, here it is: anything becomes true to us by dint of sheer repetition, impact, force, quantity, regardless of its truth.

Here’s where we demonstrate what we’re made of, steel or clay. Any fabrication, any lie, becomes truth if it gets repeated far and wide enough in terms of time, space, force, repetition or whatever form of quantity, in spite of its quality; and we’re prone to see quality in it according to the quantity we’ve been overwhelmed with.

A nice example of one of the many ways we succumb to that is those “heated” debates among puppets – pardon, among politicians: most of their time, shrewdness and energies are spent in shouting one another down and we, what do we do? We allow and condone them doing so, instead of either impeding politicians from doing so or deterring moderators from allowing it, one way or another. And so, “The puppet who screams loudest our trust is his”. And, on the other end of it, the more one is a genuine and unadulterated human being, and therefore prone to behaviour inconsistent with the stage manners we’re accustomed to consider “spontaneous normality” on the media, the more we discount him or her. And how often do we see crude people busy idolising force and, its appropriate counterpart, brutalising intelligence?
And the quantity can be served hot or cold, fast or slow: we can be overwhelmed by overload or by exhaustion.

Hot, fast overwhelming by overload exploits the bottleneck of our need of due time and attention to critically evaluate things. The trick is feeding us more than we can swallow, submerge us with a speed and amount of information above our capability to consciously receive and evaluate. The excess of input reduces our ability to critically evaluate and is hypnotic: the resulting spillage is our being hypnotized to a certain degree. You may notice how mainstream media – with art, entertainment and advertising media ranking first – specialise in this: they flood us with pointless information because they do know the excess of information reduces ability to critically evaluate – and thus leads to more passive and careless acceptance. As an “innocent” example, take notice of how cluttered and fast the scenes of movies, television and particularly music videos are today: you don’t need to resort to stop motion to realize that with such an amount of items per microsecond shown, no one is ever going to be conscious of each one of them.

Cold, slow overwhelming by exhaustion counts on wear and tear. Gutta cavat lapidem, the Romans said: the drop carves the stone. Whatever the duress we resist, it just takes keeping on with it indefinitely, and sooner or later you crumble, without even noticing it, and you too finally utter the last sentence of Orwell’s 1984: you love the Big Brother. It could be said that again we’ve been hypnotized; only, by way of time instead than by way of impact. As an “innocent” example, take notice of it in advertising: suddenly the media start hammering us with something, and we may even find it laughable or annoying; but it’s just a matter of time before we find ourselves considering not only it is a taken for granted part of our world, but above all it always has been. In the beginning, we were offended by the baseness of a jingle; in the end we hardly noticed we were humming it. Should the span gone by be significant enough within a lifetime, then we may find ourselves even nostalgic about it. Who cares? The Big Brother is not in a hurry al all.
And it’s well worth mentioning that it also works for us the other way round: nothing like media dropping an uncomfortable issue to let us drop it too. Indeed the media carpet bomb us with a continuous avalanche of other issues and so, as one problem drives away another, we let go of each one of them even before the initial impact has burned out and thus well before our being informed of it can be of any other use than further pushing us into apathy; but our condition is such that the media dropping it would be enough to let us forget about it, well before confronting its importance or doing something about it.

And finally we can be quantitative to the point of betraying ourselves dishonourably. Quite a case in point is the “Big Brother”, provided one knows George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell’s Big Brother is the quintessence of suppression which, in addition to being a horrible great likelihood, is there to describe evil in absolute terms, so that we can detect its mechanisms at work whatever the circumstances. As such, it is the product and the symbol of our highest ability to observe, analyse and stigmatise.

Then, the inconceivable blasphemy occurs: the Big Brother becomes the mother of all reality shows. The very target we point our weapon at snatches it from our hands and turns it against us. Brute force crushes intelligence. Or, rather, intelligence allows brute force to do so. And what was feared as a nightmare by intelligence, an existence under surveillance, gets usurped by the sheer brute force of television and becomes the abject trivial norm of entertainment for stultified fools.
Within a generation, we went from knowing the Big Brother as the impending absolute evil of ruthless ubiquitous expropriation and destruction of our deepest selves, thanks to Orwell, to knowing the Big Brother as the trivialised normalcy of spying each other’s bewildered staged vacuity, thanks to the puppeteers of our culture. Within a generation, we went from looking at evil straight in the eye to being the product of its success. This is not just the ultimate insult of brute force to intelligence. This is no small achievement on the part of suppressives, and no small shame on the part of us.

If we don’t protect our intelligence with enough force, it is liable to be not only crushed, but even worse tu be usurped and turned against us as well, and that’s exactly what the “winning” personality will do to the “losing” personality: when intelligence portrays to stigmatise, it uses quotation marks to express to others that its depiction is a parody for the purpose of criticism; when the “winning” personality usurps that depiction with brute force, being incapable to even notice those quotation marks, it tears them off unceremoniously, and then seizes that depiction to the letter and uses it to feed its brute force by phagocytising its own caricature in the face of a bowing down audience composed of “losing” personalities.

We're reversible:

Our behaviours drive our attitudes, rather than the reverse as it ought to be. There are no effects without causes, and we don't do anything unless we haven't previously decided to do it; be it long before or almost at the same time of the action, whether we like that decision or not, intention precedes and causes action. And our intentions and decisions stem from our points of view and our attitudes. So, usually our points of view and attitudes drive our behaviours, and the whole problem would seem to be only a matter of how sane and honest they are, that is, the quality of our information and the quality of our judgment.
But unfortunately we can be reversed: if we can be made to act in a given way, and kept at it long enough, the behaviour will shape the attitude, and we will take on the attitude that results from that behaviour. Then that shaped attitude will in turn shape our ensuing behaviours, as usual. Sort of another facet of being overwhelmed by quantity, our basic sequence from thought to action can be hijacked from the outside, and from action to thought. So those who one way or another can control enough of our behaviour to shape our attitudes will shape, control and exploit both, and in bulk. Keep us gagged long enough, and we will call insane and help stone the free singer and the free thinker and the free speaker and the whistleblower exposing our gaggers.

But that's not all: more generally, we're prone to swap causes and effects. We're so unwitting and apathetic that we almost never even start along the trail of whys that eventually leads to a real why. Thus, that passiveness prepares us to buy an effect as the cause. A wrong why is not the cause; it may be an effect, it may have nothing to do with it at all. If we're willing to buy a wrong why, then it's a short step to be willing to buy the effect as the cause. If we're willing to buy that the moon is made of cheese, we're quite likely to buy that the ebb and flow causes the moon orbit, too. Once again children have to teach us the wisdom we've forgotten: keep on asking why despite reticence and threats until a real why crops up and fulfils our quest for understanding and solutions.

We’re biased:

We privilege our accepted certainties, our acquired positions, our pet fixed ideas above proposed ones regardless, only because these are inside us and those are outside instead, so these become prejudices, so we defend lies once bought and we become the most precious allies of our enemies. Lying, even to self, refusing to see what’s in front our nose for ideological reasons, is the order of the day among us. We’re perfectly willing to trample on any evidence for the most sordid and the most “elevated” reasons alike, perfectly willing to sentence anyone to death for reasons ranging from a despicable personal profit to the conviction that’s an acceptable offering to save the world.
In each case, we deliberately close our eyes and forget that our first responsibility as human beings is that of having the courage to look. And to have it always, no matter what, come what may.
Sure enough political bias can be a case in point here as a mere study of “How silly can we get? How tragic the consequences?” “Divide et impera”, divide and rule, shouldn’t we have learned this centuries ago? I’ll discuss later on how serious and precise is the meaning of this Latin saying, but I’m sure you already smell it out.

Our inclination to bias is a blessing for those aiming at exploiting it: it means that their endeavours will be fruitful, as once they’ve succeded in remote controlling our bias to their advantage and to our detriment, they will rest assured we won’t let them down at all and quite to the contrary we will repay their efforts on a very vast scale. And the bias can have a number of faces, and underlying forms, such as: blindness of loyalty, crave for certainties, meanness, pure and simple fixation and sheer inertia.

Bias by blindness of loyalty is paradoxical because blind loyalty is actually a betrayal. In method or in subject. Out of our biased sense of loyalty we betray in method, by refusing to honestly inspect what we’re loyal to. But anything worth being loyal to proves it by standing any scrutiny, inspection, test. Therefore being honest in method exposes to the liability of being called to an adjustment, a shift, or even an upheaval, should what we’re loyal to fail the test. So here our biased sense of loyalty moves from betraying in method to betraying in subject, by refusing to honestly ask ourselves:
What is it we’re being loyal to actually, in the final analysis? Any kind of a clique supposedly benefiting from the sure detriment of all, or the whole of us? A parasite of life, or life at large?
When in Orwell's "Animal Farm" pigs appoint themselves "more equal than others", they need ferocious dogs in uniform to protect them from the other animals they conned and clobbered. Se be it very clear that the duty of those who wear uniforms is to protect the people from the powerful, while protecting the powerful from the people is High Treason, and that in order to escape one’s conscience one will end up losing it, with all that this implies for us all.

Bias by crave for certainties is our equilibrium, so frail, so on the defensive that we’re more interested in reassurance than in truth. We dread losing ourselves should our foundations be shaken. We escaped and forgot our being basically our potential for understanding, and we granted the shell of slowness and authority the title of our "protector" from brightness and integrity. We have stiffened and shrunken our identity into the shell of a few unquestionable certainties and given away our core which is the capability to face and sift out truth.

Bias by meanness is another form of shrinkage, as it stems from either disdain of one’s fellows or inability to see a wider area than one’s immediate vicinity or a honest way to get through.

Bias by fixation is just like being hypnotized: one gets warned of the cliff ahead, one thanks as if one had listened, and then one stoutly walks over its brink and plummets as if one hadn’t even heard. This proves that one is either hypocritical or not there in control of self, or both; plain and simple fact.
It’s commonplace how we obey our inner fixations first, and only then we take actual circumstances into account, but only as much as they fit our fixations.
One can also be defensive of one’s hypnotic state, and resent the attempts to make one aware of it.
Irrationality is not just a merely passive state: it actively defends itself. At the expense of the subject. And of us all.
And the valley floors of our inner selves, from where we look at the core of existence, of ourselves, of our fellows, of life and the world, are dangerously scattered with the gruesome scrapyards with heaps of plummeted people who couldn’t overcome their fixations, and of our hopes we put in them that they could. Besides loneliness, scrapyards as dangerous and polluting as the loss of hope can be.

Bias by sheer inertia is a shame like that of a life raft needing the same distance of an oil tanker to change direction or come to a halt. Our intelligence is not a material fact, it’s not bound by physical laws like that of inertia, yet we behave as if it was – which is a shame and a betrayal. Despite having apparently observed, compared, duly pondered and genuinely made up one’s mind in favour of a better course of action or state of things, one in actual fact continues the course or the state one decided to quit, so indefinitely to let others have grounds to fear the change is going to be brought about too late – if ever. A bit like those barbaric public bodies or officials that persist in misdemeanour after it was duly acknowledged and even sanctioned as such. So people feel just like the oil tanker crew, watching the lighthouse that continues to approach while hoping the captain did not give the order to change direction too late, and even wondering whether he gave it at all, when the delay gets so bad, given the circumstances, that it becomes indiscernible from inaction.

Emotional inertia is a facet worth mentioning in and of itself: here being associative and being inertial merge into our transferring our emotional reactions from the culprit to the innocent. Our support for the victims of wrongs, and our gratitude towards the heroes who denounce them, takes the form of treating them as if they were the culprits. Notice the use of the term re−action: someone or something else incites our emotions, and we are effect of that someone or something and of our emotional ardour. And once the spring is loaded, here we go: whoever and whatever within our arm’s reach in the wake of that ardour is doomed.

We’re “reasonable” – in the sense underlined by the quotes surrounding it:

It's worth recalling that the verb “to justify” means “to make something right”, and then pointing out that if something needs to be “made” right, this means it is not at all right in the first place. And we favour justification over the raw acknowledgement of crookedness: we see something wrong and, first, we instantly focus on the reasons why its being crooked is justified, and then, second, we are perfectly willing to settle with the provided reasons why it can’t be straightened – thus carefully avoiding the premise that could enable us to straighten it: plainly acknowledging that something wrong is something wrong and that's it. Part of this is we’re unwilling to confront wherever we may stand some improvement: too hard to really look at ourselves in the mirror and admit our weak spots.
And if we lead “reasonable” lives, soon we find ourselves strangled by a jungle of crooked things, and still incapable to realize how serious the situation is, and how big is our share in the responsibility for it. This “reasonableness” in quotes is a form of blindness, a subtle one in that the blind does not realize being blind. Or, rather, a more peculiar than subtle form to the degree one claims to see very well to hide from self as much as from others one’s intention to be blind.

Another blessing for manipulators: it has been said that by their fruits you will know them, and indeed at the root of suppressives’ activity there is the three−card trick of manipulating you into being “reasonable” about results – swallowing negative results, or just lack of them, without questioning and without any fuss, just clapping your paws as a good trained seal.

A meaningful example of how bad "reasonableness" can get is a religious person passively buying brain−based views from a shrink. The pompous term “shrinks” to refer to psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. indiscriminately is not uncommon, it is somewhat less so using it to highlight one of their basic common denominators: their materialistic dogma. A religious person usually holds that certain precise metaphysical entities do exist: a supreme entity creator of everything, a spirit or soul, and a whole dimension of existence, while a shrink usually holds a strictly materialistic view that the physical universe is the only thing that exists.
Hence, amongst other things, a basically hopeful and optimistic viewpoint and ensuing approach of the religious person towards the individual, seen as potentially cause, and a basically defeatist and pessimistic viewpoint and ensuing approach of the materialistic person towards the individual, seen as hopelessly effect. Belief in the existence of metaphysical entities can provide a stable absolute foundation for good and evil, while its absence can leave one devoid of any absolute and thus opens the door to absolute relativism about good and evil, so these basics now and then lead to such chilling consequences that, while the religious person considers human beings sacred due to the presence in them of that metaphysical spark, the materialistic person may get to the point of considering one's fellows as mere worthless expendable pawns. On the other hand, indeed derailed absolutes brought someone to play with fire, quarrelling about who was to be burned at the stake, while someone else, stoic, proudly preserved integrity despite the firm belief in one’s own finiteness, so common sense is always senior.

But the point here is that even far from such excesses the reasonableness on the part of the religious persons is not at all immune from deep consequences.
Passing off as demonstrated what is not yet demonstrated at all, passing off as the premise what is not yet the proven conclusion, taking for granted what is not, is so commonplace a cheating technique that every one of us should be trained to spot and reject it unflinchingly.
When a shrink indoctrinates a religious person about how the individual is a brain, the shrink is using that technique, and the religious person is letting the shrink get away with it. More and more, little by little, piece by piece, the religious person is allowing a creeping hollowing out of his/her basics about what the world and the individual are: the core foundation of existence is being stolen from the spirit in favour of the brain.

The point is not choosing a side in a challenge of faiths: that’s useless or rather harmful. The point is preventing anyone from playing dirty. Materialism these days passes off itself as taken for granted just as metaphysics did in the past, and if one inspects a little closer one sees how materialism is at least as much an article of faith and a dogma as metaphysics is and even more, an example of inspection being in terms of statistics: just compare the probabilities that life evolved from the inanimate elements of physical universe by chance to the probabilities that it did so by intention, whatever that intention may be and come from.

So the point is enforcing honesty: materialism and metaphysics must compete on equal terms and by nothing else and nothing more than demonstrating their theses true. The point of contention is: what is the individual, a spirit or a brain? Where is the individual located, in no material location or in the brain? Or, more specifically: how much of the individual is where? How much in the soul, how much in the brain? And above all, who can demonstrate what and how?

Instead, by being reasonable so much, the religious person ends up persuaded to consider the soul as some kind of a minor accessory, no more as sheer self. Moreover, the religious person ends up persuaded to accept the attempts to affect the individual by material means such as psychopharmaceuticals as legitimate instead of denouncing them as blasphemous.
These are huge paradoxes, and swallowing them in such a smooth, almost unwitting way is an accordingly huge reasonableness – or rather the ultimate reasonableness.

We’re unfair:

We look the wrong way at the wrong thing – we deliver our verdicts on things after having carefully reviewed something else. And this has even many forms, “vertically” as well as “horizontally”: not only we plainly misfire miserably by looking at the water temperature gauge to form an opinion on how much petrol we have in the fuel tank, but in addition we favour the package over the substance, the conspicuous over the important, the impressive over the actual, the subjective over the objective, the emotion over the logic. In other words, not only we judge the book by its cover, but we also judge it by the cover of the wrong book.
Do a test: take the very same information and carve it in marble, print it in an encyclopaedia, write it in a newspaper, and scribble it on toilet paper; or put it in the mouth of an academic, a politician, a clown and a tramp; then present it to people in each form and graph two things as a function of the medium carrying the information: the willingness to examinate it, and the willingness to blindly accept it.

That's not "human", not more than madness is. Madness leading one and all astray. And it even has a specific label: principle of authority – and it’s a fault all by itself. When we receive an information, we assign a score to how authoritative the source is and to how credible the information is, and then we assign this score to the information.

We don’t realize that those are entirely separated things from the information itself. The authority of the source is an issue, in that it may be a backdrop of sheer interwoven propaganda, whose sole value is that we believe it; the credibility of the information is an issue in that reality doesn’t give a damn about being credible because it does not have to, while it is credibility which is a point of view based on a mix of precedents and ability to observe and discern and evaluate, all of which are questionable. But nonetheless these are not the information itself.

An as gross as unsuspected example of trying to predict into the wrong crystal ball is personality cult, and sure enough this is a recurring success of manipulators. On stage, they feed us to indigestion with the silliest traits of the “personality” of the politician, until they make us oblivious of the elemental fact that anyone can only exert as much power as one’s fellows allow one to. Today’s strongman may put up a front as tough as he wishes but, lacking the support of those who control the money that controls the media, he’d be putting it up before his toilet bowl, not before a simultaneous broadcast.
This means that any given politician in office is but the expression of a power far wider than his or her own little self; this means that what we’re looking at is but a puppet put on the tip of the smallest tentacle of an octopus; this means that his or her “personality” is either immaterial or a mere act planned for us; this means that it is the octopus the politician is accountable to, certainly not us, and that once again what’s on stage is there for the sole purpose of hiding what takes place in the backstage while we enthusiastically bark up the wrong tree.
So let’s see that we’re not reasonable nor unfair: don’t let peculiar, conspicuous items or puppets overshadow the common denominator the manipulators can exploit behind our backs: since we judge book A by the cover of book B, all they have to do is pinpoint book B, take control of its cover, et voilà: les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus… for us.

We’re emotional:

Emotions are a form of energy that tends to take us up. Not only we can create this form of energy, but we can also allow it to grow unchecked and engulf us, to the point where we are trapped into thinking that we are emotion, instead of observing that we can feel emotions. The trap is in the shift from have to be: from being aware of something as a separate entity from us to losing that awareness and that differentiation.
To our purposes here we can compare emotion and its operation to an overload in an electrical circuit: suppose that a complex electronic circuit controlling a complex system is flooded by high voltage, and then imagine the consequences on the controlled system… well, that is the effect of emotion over thought. Furthermore, a thought overwhelmed by emotion is being relegated to a position of effect – and we know that one makes things go either right or wrong in direct ratio to how much cause or effect one is.
Suppose you go out for a personal errand to run, and you bump into a moron that provokes you for reasons totally irrelevant to you; if you rise to the bait, you can pile up any reasons why you did, but the hard fact is you did what someone else wanted you to: you have been effect. If you didn’t, and managed to stay on or resume your planned course of action, you did what you wanted to do in the first place: you have been cause. That’s it.
It’s perfectly well to use emotions as additional petrol to let more power off the wheels, as long as one remains at the steering wheel. Being overwhelmed to a point of swearing that it were you in the first place who freely caused the overwhelming and decided the change in the course of action in order to react is an entirely different thing. The word reaction itself tells it all: a re−(hyphen)−action is an effect and the cause is a previous action. To cut it short, when we get overwhelmed by either hostility, anger, rage, pain, resentment, shiftiness, fear, grief, apathy, death feel and the alike, from a resource we turn into a deadweight to ourselves and our fellows, and the wisest move is to pull the plug until we snap out of it – a bucketful of cold water would perfectly do –.

Because as usual this leak in our hull is exploited heavily and systematically, so I invite you to observe for yourself whether or not mainstream media use emotional incitement as a planned routine, the high voltage of deliberately gross emotional “ads” to bypass our rationality, while “unofficial” media tend to use cold hard facts and detailed discussions – in an eternal implicit plea to our common sense and willingness to get back in touch with ourselves. And then I ask you if, in the light of all this, you deem fit the widespread indulgence of calling these leaks in the hull “being human”.

We’re phoney:

Now and then opinions ought to be based on evaluated information, not on prejudices and fixations alone, but even when we know that our information may well stand some improvement and review, even if we do know it is likely to be false and/or incomplete, even if we do know that further information exists, information that we ought to check in order to form an honest opinion, not only we refuse to confront these further information, not only we settle with our faulty information, but after that refusal we even have the nerviness to continue spreading our faulty opinions based on faulty information, thus contributing to the spreading of falseness.
What kind of a person is one who protects his blinkers, hides behind them, and is proud of wearing them, an apprentice plague−spreader? Before objecting to this label as excessive, think of the combined effect that millions of such behaviours added up to the mainstream media apparatus can have on the amount of effort needed to open people’s eyes and keep them open…
Additionally, it may be worth mentioning just in passing here that one of the infinite strategies of a suppressive is just that of remaining ignorant – in a covertly intentional way – so that his or her actions will “involuntarily” produce damage – if possible “accidentally” just where the damage will be greater.

And finally then let’s dig a bit deeper and broader into this, to say that we’re more interested in asserting being right than in actually being right. If our opinion says A and reality says B, we choose A. Because our priority is safeguarding our legitimacy at the helm, regardless of the rocks around the hull. To a point that our opinion is reality to us, not the reality.
As usual, we just let a rational impulse go astray, spin out, get back on track the wrong way and thus become the first factor to jeopardise its own original purpose. Another blessing joins the ranks of those making our manipulators’ work more easy, far reaching, truth−proof and durable. All they have to do is conquer the fortress of our pet fixations, and from that moment on we will be their trustworthy allies against the attacks of truth and common sense.

We’re wobbling and going in circles:

Frangar, non flectar, the Latin saying goes: I’d rather break than bend. And indeed we’re volatile, incoherent even more than capricious, wobbling even more than consciously hypocritical. As if we were hypnotized to act like politicians without realizing it, our stance now is different from one moment ago, without plausible reasons intervening in the meantime.
We discuss a subject with someone and we come to a conclusion which looks like a fundamental point and a result as such, then that someone comes back later on counting on making further progress from that point onwards, only to discover that in the meantime we reversed to a stance we took prior to the discussion, that we’re probably not even aware we’re eating our words, and the whole thing was just wasted time and sweat.
We are the stone that poor Sisyphus is doomed to push up the hill only to see it roll down again – for ever.

More generally, all things have a cause and our wobbles are caused by our weakness plus external factors, and the fact is that we yield under external pressure. And under pressure we yield unconsciously, too. This makes us controllable, and controlling us it’s just a matter of: how much pressure how long and in which direction to obtain from us how much shift for how long and in which direction?
Because our shifts may well be temporary, but as long as they do serve the goals of those exploiting them, that’s perfectly ok with them. Ever heard about “Shock and Awe Doctrine”? It means just that: applying enough pressure on a populace for long enough to induce them to approve suppressive totalitarian laws against themselves, and once they’re approved, who cares if they wobble back to a flicker of awareness of what they’ve done? Using against them the new suppressive laws just passed will be not only a pleasure for suppressives, but also the very reason and target they got those laws passed for in the first place. The pressure can be impulsive of continuous, there can be a casus belli or a strategy of tension: they can shock and awe us with frightening events concentrated in little time, by throwing down a handy couple of twin towers, just as an example, or with a stream of terrorist attacks for decades, by means of an equally handy couple of subversive groups, just as another example, but these are just technical details; the whole point is we are unwittingly prone to let our stances be pushed around by external suppressive pressure into far less sensible ones – and to eat our given words as if it were nothing in the process, too.

We're daunted and overawed, slow and distracted:

It has been said that the definition of ability is: observing, deciding, acting. It is my opinion that a key part of this definition is what is not in it: things like hesitating, waiting, postponing, etc. are not included nor contemplated. The time to get into action is solely the "technical" time to collect information, verify it and evaluate it. But we take aeons to go through elemental logical steps and reach elemental obvious conclusions. The more observable and clear something is, the faster one should grasp it but no, we're mysteriously slow.

The obvious requisite of observing is having there one to do the observing; could this be the issue? Could it be the case that our physical mass is all there, but some of our attention is not − and a rather large amount, judging by our near−stall speed? So, if not in the here and now, where in the world is that attention of ours scattered, if one may ask? In short: where are we? But we're daunted, too, come to think of it. So let's add a second question: what in the world made us that overawed? In short: where are we hiding, and what are we hiding from?
In light of these two questions, it's as if we had been kicked in the teeth for very long, until we learned the hard way that whatever we say or decide or do, or even observe, or we don't say, decide, do or observe, it's our fault anyway and we're wrong and entitled to some punishment, whatever. So whatever we say or don’t say, do or not do, etc., we had better be circumspect, very circumspect; after all, we’re waiting for the next blow anyway, isn’t it? And out of all this distraction we’re quite prone to make mistakes, too, and all these are but symptoms of quite an amount of suppression received, not handled and accumulated, which is to say, a serious potential trouble source condition.

And that's why history is that slow and civilisation takes eons to progress imperceptibly. And that’s another factor that makes us so malleable in the hands of manipulators: we’re too daunted, overawed, slow and distracted to realize being manipulated. Just guess at the amount of additional damage for us all for every hour, day, year, century wasted waiting for us to wake up.

We’re somnambulists:

Lazy and half asleep, we’re prone to drift into semi−hypnotic states. Instead of mastering our attention with self−discipline, we seem to reward that sort of cellular instinct whose highest aim is that “energy saving” state where once the stomach is full all that’s left to do is yawn and scratch it. As a result not only the mainstream media but even education are planned to push us along that line with all sorts of lullabies.

As hypnosis requires bypassing, usurping, stealing someone’s control before one can exploit it, then lullabies are composed of distracting first, penetrating second, manipulating third, and these steps take on countless forms, such as the falsely interesting, the relaxing, the boring, the overwhelming repetitive. An example of it are the usual “conditions of use”, those streams of clauses we all know and no one reads before putting one’s signature at the bottom: the crossing is so long, in so thick and deep a quicksand, that no one survives it, and thus surrenders to whatever malicious may be hidden in it.

We’re flammable:

We resemble thoroughbreds that champ at the bit while ploughing at crawl’s pace through jammed tight windy alleys, overeager to hurl at full gallop. Intolerant of the tireless, accurate and systematic pace required to confront every fragment in order to piece the puzzle together, we’re constantly searching for a blunt oversimplification to grab and weave. We start a quest for answers but during the descent into details we give up to a drive to give vent. We’re like time bombs ready to get triggered by either those who do know and exploit this weak spot, or by our own meanest instincts, and as such a very serious liability to our fellows, particularly when one detonation triggers many other in a chain reaction, utterly compromising any way out.

One thing is the right amount of explosive in the right place at the right time to blow the cage door; quite another is a random amount in a random place at a random moment to cave the cage vault in on all of us. Force without intelligence is a curse. And once the fuses are blown, our effects on the situation are those of the stone the disheartened Sisyphus watches rolling downhill.

Additionally, this is another heavily exploited fault because the exploiters know what the culmination of being flammable is, and that is what they want from us particularly: our fondness for anathemas. Once someone or something is excommunicated, in the cosy shade of the wall we erect we don’t have to go to any trouble any more.

It’s worth mentioning here how anathemas and excommunications conflict with the basics of human and civil rights – or common sense, for that matter.
One ought to be enabled to confront one’s accusers and accusations with equal rights? The walls of anathemas do not restrict themselves to excommunicating the subject merits in plain view, but they take pains to excommunicate even the mere daring to look at the subject in order to know what those merits are in the first place.
One ought to be enabled to freely question anyone and anything as answers lack only where someone’s got something to hide? The walls of anathemas take pains to excommunicate as well questioning labels in order to know the merits they are based upon.
To build an impenetrable fortress, there’s nothing like making immoral, guilty and dangerous not only what’s excommunicated, but also the reasons why it is, investigating such reasons, and the mere daring to look in that direction too much. And guess who are the soulless brutes defending that fortress and making common sense immoral, guilty and dangerous?
History is fed up with rabid dogs with blown fuses joining the ranks and lighting the torches of holy wars and stakes, as we never seem to learn any lesson about being potential trouble sources manipulated by suppressives exploiting our flammableness.

We’re lemmings:

Group thinking, sense of belonging, conformism, herd instinct, you name it… our judgment and opinions are those of a gregarious fish: nailed to the centre of the school of fish, whatever and regardless. What determines our evaluations is not the focal point of truth, but the focal point of the school; we favour the centre of the school over the centre of truth as if we feared predatory fishes lurking around the school.

To put it in the right perspective, one may want to review not only the term “groupthink”, but the term “Abilene paradox” as well…
Significantly, Orwell first warned us about the horrors of “groupthink” in his 1984, and then later on researchers detailed them: the compulsion to conformity, not only instinctive but even worse rationalised, produces damaging decisions and actions, sacrifice of critical thinking, active suppression of alternative and dissenting viewpoints, the idea of an “outside” and the isolation from it, the overrating of the group’s decisions and the underrating and dehumanisation of the “outside”, with anything that this may involve.
But things can get even worse than that: in an anecdote taking place in that city, the “Abilene paradox” describes how a group of individuals agrees on collective decisions and actions against both the preferences and best interests of all as a consequence of the fact that, due to lack of communication, everybody thinks that those decisions and actions are wrong but is convinced that everybody else agrees with them. At which point, “groupthink” does the rest.

Thus just as gregarious fishes can be fooled and driven into the fishing net en masse by shadow play, so are we by the mainstream media casting around us the semblance of a non−existent school of fish made up to push our opinions where they want them. In fact, mainstream media exploit this by presenting a false unanimity favourable to the positions they want us to accept as “mainstream”.

Meaningfully enough, we find here on a pounding and incessant global scale one of the traits of suppressive, antisocial persons: the vague generalities used systematically to spread anything, particularly when it’s negative and false – those “everybody knows”, “everybody thinks” that prove perfidiously false as much as perfidiously promoted when that “everybody” under scrutiny shrinks to “the antisocial alone” –.
Indeed after long enough such a process, reality begins to resemble the promoted semblance, but only because reality is made of individuals, individually hammered long enough with the intended non−existent “unanimity mainstream” semblance, until they get out, meet one another and mistake manipulation for unanimity. At which point it’s a done deal, all gregarious fishes close ranks and the real school of fish becomes the intended and fabricated one. And we do know that lemmings have a peculiar inclination, when it comes to group thinking, conformism, herd instinct: that to emulate, amongst all, those heading for the pond to drawn in it.

It has been said that on one hand understanding is composed of affinity, agreement and communication, each of whom drives the other two, and on the other hand that sentient individuals are different while their irrationalities are equal. Hence, if we leave ourselves unattented, agreement among our irrationalities is utterly automatic, spontaneous, unwitting, but nonetheless overwhelming, while agreement among our sentient selves lags behind and gets overwhelmed. This means that remaining sentient, rational and understand one another is like bicycling: we either pedal to keep both our sentient individuality and our mutual understanding afloat through affinity, agreement and communication among us, or fall in the endless muddy traps scattered along our roads.

We’re associative:

Alas not in the “united we stand”, “strength in numbers” sense, but rather in the “one size does fit all” sense or, to be more precise, “one’s fault, blame all”, “all the same” one. It has been said that sanity is the ability to discern, to detect differences and similarities, and insanity is the inclination to the inverse, so let’s take a brief closer look at what that “inverse” is.

To begin with, we’re talking about degrees: say we’re being asked what differences there are among the pieces coming out of a mould; one degree is answering their colour when this is the case; a greater degree is answering their individual manufacturing faults; an even greater degree is answering that even if they were all same colour and faultless, they’re anyway not the same piece, they’re made of different molecules and occupy a different space.
Secondly, what these degrees consist of when proceeding in the opposite direction? It’s easy to say “all men/women are the same”, but what does the person saying this think, exactly? It’s an interesting exercise to conceive, to track how little by little, step by step, separate things become the same thing, the very same thing, in the eye of the beholder. At first, it’s when one really loses it that one thinks to oneself that “all men/women are the same”, but that’s just a silent moment that subsides pronto, and one is fully aware that idea is false, extraneous and resulting from an altered state of madness. Then as one piles up burst after burst, slowly the bolts loosen and the leaks show up and worsen. Until one is not aware of being temporarily overwhelmed any more, for the very good reason that that state has by now become permanent, and that idea is no more felt as extraneous; on the contrary, what one once used to say as a joke, one is now saying with dreadful seriousness: now “all men/women are the same” for real in one’s eyes.

It’s a dreadful experience to dive clearly into such a state, and watch how over there separate things can actually become the same thing; it has been said that we are understanding and thus we find particularly difficult to conceive states of lessened understanding, but that is exactly what we’re confronting here, a state of mind where one can actually consider that, worth repeating it, different thing are the same thing – not similar things, mind – the SAME thing: thing A does not just RESEMBLE thing B; now it IS it. A mental short circuit colloqually labelled A=A, where the “equal” sign more and more becomes an “IS” sign between items once distinct and now more and more becoming the SAME thing: A=A, A=A=A, A=A=A=A, and so forth in a progressive landslide of reason in a bottomless pit of darkness.

We previously discussed how the personality shift from victim to oppressor seals the lid of the potential trouble source’s trap, remember? Well, here you have a closer look of how that too takes place. And I ask you to please pause and ponder it for a moment. It’s a state of such lessened understanding, while we do are understanding in the first place, that it almost tends to lift as one observes it. But it nonetheless does exists, and how much people does it absorb, and for how much of their lives, and with how much consequences on the lives of us all?

Yep, because when you look at that from the viewpoint of manipulation, you see how easy it is to exploit our sort of inclination for putting everyone and everything in the same basket, that sort of transitive property of our judgement: whether you want to demonise or sanctify someone or something in our eyes, all you have to do is show it to us associated with someone or something else already demoniac or holy to us, keep at it long and loud enough, and the negative or positive connotation will inextricably transmigrate into the target, paving the way to the onset of the prejudices, anathemas, and eventual communication cuts that will prevent us from inspecting what’s actually there in the first place.

Advertising and propaganda are an unlimited source of examples: when they want to sell you a car, they pretend to be selling you a whole beautifully desirable world surrounding it, which is totally unreal; when they want to discredit an opponent, they put him or her close to something politically incorrect, that may be just as unreal, or actually totally extraneous anyway.
Indeed, metaphors, parables and other forms of association are seemingly used solely to increase the impingement of something by associating it with something else more familiar to the target audience, but even in rhetoric there’s more than meets the eye as to our being associative: “white” becomes “snow white”, “cold” “ice cold”, “hot” “hot like hell”, “that thing” “that hell of a thing”, the “lost” becomes “lost sheep” and the “rescuer” “good shepherd”, and so on.
Well, what we’re not much aware of is that these are not just mere intensifiers: some of what they mean to us seeps into what they’re associated with. Hence, to us, that white will taste of snow, that cold will taste of ice, that hot will taste of hell, that thing will be somewhat hellish, rescue will imply submission, and so on.

We specialise in merging the book and its cover, the datum with its presentation, and then in judging the book by the cover, persuaded that the presentation of the datum is the datum. You say it’s too unconcealed to work? Remember we’re quantitative: let’s take a second look at it after they worked at it enough. So it’s not that what’s wrong with being associative is overdoing it: there is not an acceptable level of being associative, it’s a pitfall in itself. It’s playing into the hands of our manipulators.

We’re short−sighted:

The map of short−sightedness has at least two dimensions, that we may call width and length: width is connecting items located all in the present, but possibly belonging to different contexts, while length is connecting items belonging to different times; any further possible dimension may mix these as well as span across any kind of seeming extraneousness between areas and facts. All of them require knowledge and broad−mindedness to pick up the pieces to put them together, so all those who aim at whatever degree of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty−Four target our ability to handle those dimensions: our willingness, curiosity, independence, initiative, intelligence, orderliness, critical sensibility, knowledge, historic memory, etc. In other words, our willingness to look beyond. And we’re more than obliging: whether induced or spontaneous, the way we can’t focus farther than our nose and thus fall short of our duties as members of mankind is even a Russian Doll, where the inner one is at the root of the next outer one.

Short−sighted as to the scope:
We’ve been taught that the brightness of our future is founded on all of us concentrating on becoming specialists. Interestingly enough, this very concept of specialisation is stressed at both ends: both individuals and nations must specialise in the few things they do best, and the fewest these things are, the better.
We’ll discuss its purpose for the nations ahead; here, far as the individual is concerned, let’s observe that it’s when you piece the puzzle together that you see the picture and understand it, that to piece it together you have to have the pieces, that to have them you have to dig them out, and that to dig them out you have to be aware there are pieces out there to reassemble in the first place.

The intended result of mainstream education is less critical evaluation and more plain acceptance, is teaching you to forget your ability to put together the pieces and to concentrate on becoming a short−sighted specialist that merely handles your piece, totally unaware of its relationships to the rest of the puzzle. No more a free autonomous thinker, researcher, observer, evaluator; now a mere executor providentially oblivious of the existence of puzzles.
A further “convenient” facet of this oblivion is through the pulverization of responsibility: when committing a crime, be it legalised or not, is the sole decision of a single or few individuals, facing one’s conscience and responsibility is a hardly avoidable issue; but when that decision is split into high enough a number of decisions small enough and short−sighted enough, the concealment of the puzzle will make committing crimes possible without conscience and responsibility noticing it.
Another “convenient” facet can be seen now and then in praises of blind obedience, particularly stressed on those instrumental in acting as tools in the hands of the few to oppress the many, such as those wearing some kind of uniform: these are educated to be proud of their blinkers, of trusting and serving with limited knowledge, so that when needed they can be brought to “protect” people by shooting them, and in absolute good faith.
But when the survival of us all is at stake, there is no right to stupidity, there is no right to ignorance, there is no right to no confront. There are no excuses, no eluding, the truth is basically simple and you've got nowhere to hide, nothing to hide behind: are you being loyal to whom? To a clique suppressing the rest of us, or to us all?

Hard to defeat short−sightedness in scope when it is but the outer Russian Doll supported by its inner ones.

Short−sighted as to ethics:
If we can’t see that there is only one survival and it’s the survival of everyone and everything, we’re too selfish to survive – or too short−sighted, which is a synonym –. Some may think they only live once, so the only thing that counts is granting themselves anything they can put their hands on in their limited time and space, and to hell with everyone and everything else: when life will present the bill, they will be dead dust anyway. Well, whether we live once or more, that’s beside the point: it’s from the community point of view that these people fall short of the minimum requirements. This obviously applies to the moronic variant of the apprentice sorcerer, too: in addition to having suppressive intentions and to being PTS of someone else's suppressive intentions, there is also being plainly reckless and irresponsible; indeed playing with fire without an inkling of what one is playing with falls quite short of such minimum requirements.

And it’s also worth highlighting a specific facet of our short−sightedness as to ethics due to the seriousness of its consequences. When we do not realise that life is a group effort and the only survival is that of everyone and everything, we judge the success of individuals by their individual “success”, by which we mistakenly mean the differential between their social standing and that of their fellows: the higher they stand above the others, the greater their “success”. Needless to say, if that’s the goal, one may decide to pursue it by pushing others down, isn’t it? Moreover, since on average a suppressive is more selfish than others, and also tends to spread suppressive ideas such as that “success” consists of just that very differential, as a result suppressives tend to achieve the highest differential, and we end up ranking as most “successful” just the very suppressive individuals at the root of our misfortunes. When they say, digging our own grave like good potential trouble sources…

That individuals have a good and a dark side may be considered an approximation of the fact that they have a range of possible behaviours and they can be manipulated within that range. Thus selfishness is potentially possible just as honesty, but it is far more systematically cultivated and exploited, and it easily reaches a point of spontaneous combustion, where selfishness produces isolation, that in turn produces selfishness, that in turn produces isolation, that… do I need to say more?
And selfishness is a synonym of short−sightedness because one easily results in the other: when one doesn’t give a damn about others it’s easy to concentrate only on the pieces of the puzzle in one’s immediate vicinity and only to exploit them, and to mind about puzzles only as much to enable one to steal and scam. You can already see that in a smaller, “innocent” scale, when a life, a casualty a thousand miles away is infinitely less valuable than one next door: out of sight out of mind, isn’t it?

Hard to escape short−sightedness in scope when one is short−sighted in ethics.

Short−sighted as to awareness:
When we look at ourselves in the mirror, is anyone there? When we ask ourselves who we are, where are we going, and why, whose answer do we get? Our own, or that of some odd machinery we’ve relinquished ourselves to? Are we even capable to drag ourselves in front of a mirror and ask ourselves these questions? Had we, inadvertently or not, slipped into an armour made of personalities other than our own, would we be able to realise it? Botched, quickie, random scraps of personalities not our own, accidentally thrown together in the least conscious way and for the least conscious reasons, which are not remotely, not the least, not at all “us”, no matter how much we're convinced they are.

In other words, are we capable to be three feet back of our head and look at the whole thing – the scene and the items in it, ourselves included – from outside and from above? Artificial personalities are more selfish than individuals. Because there is nobody there. Just machinery. Nobody there to tell right from wrong.

Hard to escape short−sightedness in ethics when short−sighted in awareness. Hard to feel, hard to be reached, hard to be touched, when there is nobody there.

We’re unbalanced:

We can’t rank things. It has been said that evaluating is comparing: features, values, importance can only be relative, can only be assessed against terms for comparison. If you try to figure out the absence of any other item to compare something to, you’re probably going to find it quite difficult; and this probably demonstrates how comparing is intrinsic to – if not synonym of – evaluating. Evaluating assigns values, and values are but degrees of fitness to a purpose. Indeed, things are compared to other things and against purposes, and both other things and purposes can be considered terms of comparison. This results in values being relative: a thing is more or less important when compared to another thing, and when considered with regards to a purpose. And a purpose as well is more or less important than another purpose when considered against a more basic purpose. Just as an order of magnitude is wider or smaller than another order of magnitude.
All this eventually traces back to the basic of ethics: survival of everything and everyone in the best possible condition for the longest time possible. Then ethics is a matter of degrees, where “doing one’s best” in actual fact means ascertaining and doing what is relatively better amongst all the possible courses of action.
Our fault here is violating the relative importance: we either can’t or won’t see the actual ethics hierarchy between purposes and between things, so we favour the trivial over the vital, and we have the guts to polish up a couple of portholes while we let the rust eat the whole hull away. It certainly is a wholesome exercise that of detecting the endless forms and cases of us indulging in it and of our manipulators indulging in creating and exploiting such forms and cases.

And quite a case in point of our being unbalanced is the “button of self−importance”: when our purpose shifts from doing a good job to feeling important.
A “button” is a point of effect in our behaviour: something or someone does A – action, consequently we do B – re−action; it’s as if we had a button: every time A presses that button we carry out B; no matter how many times our button is pressed, one, ten or a billion, each and every time the effect is the same: we carry out B and nothing but B. A byword for hypnosis. If there’s any awareness at all in the button of self−importance, that’d be “misunderstanding cause”; if there were any thinking in it worth the name, that’d be the idea that the way to be cause is inserting an alteration along the line regardless; but awareness and thought are hardly the case when it comes to self−importance.
At a passing glimpse it’d seem just a matter of “New broom? Let your voice be heard!”, when the new in−charge revolutionises everything because his purpose is merely throwing his weight around, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg; in actual fact this button spans even two opposite directions: egocentricity and self−abnegation.
For the egocentric, showing one’s existence has top priority and the way to achieve it is inserting something personal, so that the inserted item is different and thus noticeable is definitely more important than it makes sense at all and thus it’s needed and helpful instead of arbitrary and harmful. Symmetrically, for the self−denying, removing self as a factor from the scene and the equation has top priority and the way to achieve it is indeed denying self, so that doing so at any cost is more important than any damage caused by not standing up when required.
In both cases the importance of self went off the rails and out of proportion with the situation: the river is about to exceed the danger level and everyone is needed – at the double, please – to help pile up sandbags on the river bank; over here you can spot the egocentric stalling the action because someone else decided where to place the sandbags, while over there you can spot the self−denying stalling the action by refusing to decide how to place them.

Life is a group effort by a network of living nodes; each node must contribute with what is needed for the effort to succeed. This means originating something good when it’s lacking and needed, as well as passing on what is already there and good instead of altering it or stopping it, as well as stopping what is bad instead of propagating it; all this requires that each and every node is fully aware of what the actual place of self−importance is, and that each and every node exercises it accordingly. This said, I’ll leave up to you to observe real examples of how successfully self−importance, once it short−circuits into each one of its opposite “buttons”, egocentricity and self−abnegation, can be exploited.

We’re blasphemous – particularly against ourselves:

Blasphemy consists in undermining through degradation, in easing destruction with downgrading. The term and its best example come from the religious sphere: blasphemy consists in debasing a higher entity by playing it off as a lesser entity, such as a god as an idol, or a spirit as a brain. One is a higher entity because it has a metaphysical (the “meta” prefix meaning beyond), spiritual (spiritual meaning not subject to and beyond material limits, among other things) nature and attributes, while the other is a material entity carrying earthly issues strictly bound within those limits. A god or a spirit is a being, an idol or a brain is a thing, and a being and his/her attributes are senior to a thing and its attributes. Hence the blasphemy, and its seriousness lies in the disrespect, in the deception, and in their vast serious consequences as well. But the seriousness of the consequences of what we call blasphemy and deception is not limited to the religious sphere.

Time and again we’ve been told and taught by wiser forerunners that we inexorably begin to care about issues just a shade too late, and they are wise because of the snowball effect: the more you allow a threat to grow, the stronger it gets and the harder to defeat. It has been said that it’s better to stop villains when they are still small… that’s where the importance of our alertness, resolve, determination, as opposed to our lag, lies. And indeed those forerunners referred to our freedom, in the first place: we care about our freedom – provided we care about it at all – when it’s too late, when nearly all of it has already been stolen and recovering it is a nearly desperate task. How come this lag?

We have a despicable inclination to mimic and adopt the laws of the physical universe; we’re higher entities with a disposition to the self−degradation of behaving like lesser entities. And this is not only blasphemous, but destructive as well. It is blasphemous because we are not material entities – not when we exercise our faculties at the very least – so when we downgrade ourselves to the lesser level of material things this is what we do. But what about the consequences?
In the physical universe there is a law we call “the Law of Supply and Demand” according to which the value of something is determined by how scarce or abundant that something is. I’ll mention just in passing that when our inclination replaces that “something” with “someone” we pave the way to a bottomless stream of horrors, and I’ll leave it up to you to list as many examples as you can recognize of us acting on that basis, but I invite you to look at what happens when it comes to freedom: since we value freedom on the basis of its abundance or scarcity, hence history cyclically repeats itself, and when we feel we have lots of freedom – regardless of it being real or already merely staged – we drop its value and so we go on overlooking the endless stream of “minor” restrictions and losses of freedom, so that when we finally wake up we’re already slave since very long.

And we crave for blame shifting.

Which is an issue in itself, penultimate but far from the least. I previously started by mentioning as “good practice” assuming the viewpoint of complete responsibility whatsoever; now it’s appropriate to mention our lethal inclination to the exact opposite “bad practice”: “not my fault”, “none of my business”, “not my responsibility”, “he who minds his own business lives for 100 years”, when on the contrary anything under the sun, everywhere and anytime, is your business, too. Even when we blame all sorts of politicians, public officials and civil servants whose basic aim is overthrowing who is accountable to whom, and turning citizens from their masters and employers into their slaves and cash cows, there’s more than a hint of this: sure, when it comes to taking responsibility we may be forced to come to terms with circumstances, but are we nonetheless asking ourselves what can we actually do, or our complaints are a mere ritual to exorcise this very question?
Our insatiable crave for irresponsibility does even ramify into inanimate matter; and its pernicious consequences are much like inanimate matter: almost unlimited.
A case in point is the demonisation of plastic currently en vogue: plastic in itself is blamed for the environmental problems related to it, hence the “solution” eagerly hailed by the humanoids is getting rid of plastic. Plastic is probably the first original large−scale material created by Man; its so−called flaws are actually its very virtues it was created for: a plastic bag weighing one fifth of an ounce allows one to hold together and easily transport eleven pounds of bulk load with one hand while freeing the other hand, waterproof, not affecting the load, unaffected by it, remaining indefinitely so, and efficiently, easily and completely recyclable.

It is well known that it is the hand that operates the tool and not the tool that operates itself, but woe betide he who dares to point the finger at the hand craving to escape responsibility, and blessed he who plays along with it by shifting the blame to the innocent tool. Consensus is built by blaming the valuable tools into disuse rather than by calling the hands to face their responsibilities.
A second case in point shows how far the consequences of shifting the blame from the irresponsible hand to the innocent tool can go: weapons. Play along enough with irresponsibility and the result is defenceless citizens at the mercy of their enemies, whether within or outside the law. Thomas Jefferson supposedly said that when the government fears the people you have liberty, and when the people fear the government you have tyranny, and Thomas Paine said that it is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government; I invite you to observe how governments dispossess citizens of sovereignty, and how this takes the form of the monopoly of the use of force. Well, to the degree people is convinced that weapons are something intrinsically bad to stay away from, and that the government is intrinsically entitled to the monopoly of the use of force, to that degree anyone seizing government will be on a clear path to enslave and expropriate us all with the least “disturbance”.

We act like prey chased by predators, and when one runs away one is effect: a getaway can only take the roads not yet barred by chasers, and moment by moment chasers gain ground and the prey loses it, inch by inch the room for manoeuvre shrinks, and we find ourselves more and more trapped in dead end situations and conditions.
And the predators chasing us are all the responsibilities we did not take.
Sure, it can be hard to take responsibility. If it wasn’t, we’d probably take it more often and easily. But if at least it was just a matter of each single responsibility overlooked… alas the best is yet to come.

The sooner the better, before things get seriously bad, is not news, after all, is it? But how much seriously bad? Disregarded responsibilities seem to accumulate in an exponential way: the more there are, the more their total weight exceeds the sum of their individual weights. And every one of them is not necessarily serious, and escaping every one of them gives an apparent relief – even if we basically know what’s going on: we’re failing our duties.
And in the meantime is like the wheel creating a deeper rift in the track: getting out of it becomes ten times as harder at every passage. Sure, it can be hard to take responsibility, but the consequences of not doing it are even worse, and it may even be seen, if it wasn’t for apathy hiding it…

So we better underline the viewpoint of complete responsibility by saying to ourselves that “Everyone, everything, everywhere, anytime does concern me, and I shall better always ask to myself: what part of the problem I may be responsible for? So as to better understand – even more important – how can I do something about it?”

And, finally, we dramatise.

That may be a proper conclusion for this cobbled together list, in that the previous faults are rooted here.
The definition of dramatising here is different from those we know: it does not mean to stage nor to make a big deal of it. It does mean to reproduce. Like a recorder, we play back a record. A button gets pushed on us, and we do it again.
No matter how deeply and remotely the record that we play back is buried in our past and in our mind, that’s the simplicity of it: we once kicked in the teeth or got kicked in the teeth, and now we play it back and do it again.
The point is, we are not knowingly selecting something from experience and then reworking it in view ot the present, oh no. We are not being cause; we are being effect: something selects the record to play and, just like a recorder, everytime the button gets pushed, hardly aware of anything, we just play the record. A type of record that happens to dictate our behaviour, attitude, thoughts, ideas, decisions…

The result is very much like that which makes us call a PTS a PTS: the resulting troubles. Here, too, we amplify and relay the wrong, instead of detecting and stopping it.
And so the wrong survives and even thrives, passed on from hand to hand, from person to person, from generation to generation, from civilisation to civilisation, to our detriment and shame.
How do you tell right from wrong? How do you tell what is sane, rational, constructive from what is insane, irrational, destructive? Well, ethics: does it produce the better and more lasting condition for the greates number of entities involved? And does it do that for real?

By the way, an interesting case of the combination of two of our humanoid faults, being quantitative and dramatising, is called: dramatising a can’t have. The definition of to have, of having, of havingness, here is: being able to reach; being not impeded from reaching. For example, if you can look at something or someone you like, and you’re not impeded from doing so, well, you have that something or someone. You don’t need to drag it along: if you can have it into your universe, you have it.
This said, you may observe how some indulge in this peculiar dramatisation that exploits the victim’s inclination to be quantitative: the dramatising person communicates, over and over, to the target person the message, “This is desirable, desire it!” Until as a result, being quantitative, the target reacts to that persistence by moving up a scale of attitudes from the initial total unawareness of "it" to the final craving for "it".
And once the target is burned to a crisp, what does the dramatising person tell him? “You crave for it now, don’t you? Well, you can’t have it.” That is, the sole and whole purpose for creating a craving for "it" in the first place is denying "it". Creating a desire only to frustrate it.
It is remarkable to note how often that "it" is self: how some people strives to seduce for the sole purpose of, “You crave for me now, don't you? Well, you can’t have me.”
However, even though this dramatisation is particularly conspicuous in the field of relationships, it is quite not peculiar to it; on the contrary, it makes an interesting exercise to detect it at work in any area of life and human behaviour.

Is dramatisation sane, rational, constructive? But how much of it in the world, and how much the damage?

Truth doesn’t give a darn about being credible because it doesn’t need us believing it to exist; truth does not need us, it is us that need it to survive, as the truth is the way things are and in order to survive one has to solve the real and exact problems, not the false and wrong ones.
It has been said that the falsehoods, since the truth makes them vanish, actively fight truth in order to survive; and that every thing crooked, wrong, that is not the way it ought to be and produce succumbing instead of survival is such and persists because it contains falsehood.
And we, even before being allergic to the attitude needed for the quest for truth, we’re allergic to truth itself; as soon as we smell it we react like animals in danger: we run from it if we can and if we can’t we fight it till death.
Consequently, if we don’t grab ourselves by the scruff of the neck, where and when those who are trying would need us and our help or its lack makes the difference between life or death, we’re liable to be considered for what we are: constraints instead of resources, part of the problem that won’t be part of the solution, betrayers of our place in the world.