Overt versus Covert
It has been said that how to tell suppression from help, destructiveness from constructiveness, bad intentions from good intentions, is the most important knowledge there is. Why? Because if you can’t, suppression infiltrates everywhere, in every good thing, and someday there is no more civilisation, just hell. The basis on which to build every other thing is no more there. So, how to tell one thing from the other? And why is it difficult to do?
It has been restated and emphasised in many ways: “Look, don’t think.” “Look, don’t listen.” “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Why do you have to look at their actual products, to judge by sheer results – and by products and results alone?
First, of course, is because life is based on results achieved. But there’s another, perhaps less obvious reason.
A suppressive aims at destroying others; trying to destroy by openly attacking in plain sight is the difficult way to go about it, because you can fight back what you detect. Trying to destroy covertly is the easier way, because you won’t fight what you don’t realize it’s there.
That’s why suppressives are so constantly busy building up a false world around you, while striving to look innocently uninvolved: they are covering what they are actually doing; so you are subject to a continuous pressure to convince you that what is false is true and what is true is false, and what is right is wrong and what is wrong is right.
Overt versus Covert, 2
Fellow comes over to you and tells you, «Hello, do you mind if I slaughter you rather thoroughly?» You'd feel induced to a given degree of circumspection, isn't it? Another fellow comes over to you and tells you, «You know I'm your friend, always been, and I'm telling you this only for your own good, mind, you know all too well that everybody covertly thinks that you ought to give in to those who know best and give up looking with your own eyes and… (shrink yourself one way or another).» Would you feel induced to the same degree of circumspection?
The line between the two methods of suppression is your alarm threshold. Hence those who use the covert method have every interest in raising it: the higher your alarm threshold, the more suppression can take place without you realising it. In the real world this is enacted on two fronts: one is nipping in the bud your brilliance, your curiosity, your critical sense and your gumption, and diverting your attention, by perverting education and popular culture; the other is nipping truth in the bud with a totalitarian control on the hierarchies controlling the information channels.
And therefore that’s why you never “think” about the “reasons why”, but just “look”, why you never “listen” to the “explanations”, but just “look”: what’s really there? What’s the real final product of their actions – and even more that of their advice?
And it’s obvious this is particularly true – and particularly worth strictly adhering to and putting into actual practice – in the face of opposition: when someone begins to “object” to your plain looking and asking questions and demanding answers and verifying them, by either raising hell or the quicksand of reticence, elusiveness, diversion, that’s where you know the chances someone is trying to cover up something unpalatable reach the peak.