Tag: postulates

The Slippery Slope to Totalitarianism

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Postulate:

Humanity has a short memory and fails to learn from the past.

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The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until 1976. Its publicly stated goal was to preserve Chinese socialism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society.

In May 1966, with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao launched the Revolution and said that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. Mao called on young people to bombard the headquarters and proclaimed that “to rebel is justified”. Mass upheaval began in Beijing with Red August in 1966. Many young people, mainly students, responded by forming cadres of Red Guards throughout the country. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung became revered within his cult of personality. In 1967, emboldened radicals began seizing power from local governments and party branches, establishing new revolutionary committees in their place while smashing public security, procuratorate and judicial systems. These committees often split into rival factions, precipitating armed clashes among the radicals. After the fall of Lin Biao in 1971, the Gang of Four became influential in 1972, and the Revolution continued until Mao’s death in 1976, soon followed by the arrest of the Gang of Four.

From Wikipedia

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The first step towards totalitarianism is to purge those who are against you and promote loyal brown nosers and supporters. Sycophantic yes-men are preferred over anyone who queries even if said queries are wise.

The intelligentsia must be crippled and undermined, democracy called into question and belittled. Propaganda is more important than fact. Short adamant statements hook and are preferred over detail.

Any voice to the contrary must be silenced, preferably in public and painfully so.

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Postulate:

The cult of the personality is on the rise in humanity at large.

Substance and ethics are demoted and no longer important. Mini-me types are cloning themselves. We are sleep walking into very retrograde times.

People are easily drawn into group mind which prevents true thinking. Grievance can be exploited to garner support. Give someone an enemy and they will fall in behind you against them. Enemies unite rabbles and crowds.

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Postulate:

Humanity has an anathema for inconvenient truths.

Humanity prefers any story or “plan” which means that they do not have to change their ways. If someone says that anthropogenic climate change is exaggerated that is easier to believe, because they want to. There is confirmation bias. People prefer to stick their heads in the sand rather than change. The bringer of messages which go against the inconvenient truths is a hero, a friend, “I told you so!”

Goebbels comments here on the power of mantra, the repetition of which can be black magic.

Postulate:

There is no such thing as a sustainable quick fix, this is an inconvenient truth.

Immediacy does not solve anything, knee jerks are never considered they are at best reactive.

Focused blame cultures and look-at-me attempts to fix “single-issue” problems are misguided if popular. It is easier to blame external factors than to accept responsibility and work hard at root cause.

Postulate:

China and Russia were never communist despite finger pointing to the contrary. They were / are totalitarian or authoritarian at best.

The bogey man of communism is an American invention, it has never been realised. Western quasi-socialism of the last century is the closest humanity has come to that ideal.

Postulate:

The cult of the personality is a very dangerous and a slippery slope. This too is an inconvenient truth.

There are numerous examples of this cult currently active and perhaps growing in the so-called democratic West. People can get easily caught up in the faux-euphoria of group mind and its sense of belonging.

Narcissists however have absolutely zero notion of loyalty and are fickle, motivated only by their own desires. Supporters are not shown the loyalty expected and demanded of them.

Postulate:

Humanity is again on the slippery slope to widespread totalitarianism pretending to be democracy.

Self-Diagnosed Omniscience and the Closed Mind

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I have been having a dabble on LinkedIn and am more than a little surprised at the plethora of coaching, self-development schema and other things which sound too good to be true. People have to make a buck and the platform is used to tout and sell services. My logic suggests that either there are a lot of insecure and incapable people who need someone to help them and therefore there is a market or there are lot of “experts” surplus to demand. It has always seemed a bit of swizz to me. Someone develops some schema, some training, then demands payment from others to be certified by them. This kind of business model is in Aikido, NLP, Reiki etc. Someone must issue the certificates.

But exactly who was the source certificate, who passed them as competent?

I’ll postulate that many imagine their knowledge and wisdom to be more extensive and comprehensive than it actually is. This group of people includes really smart people at universities.

We might call them the self-diagnosed omniscient or the know-it-all gang. There are a lot of people who think they are “experts” who are unaware of the extent and breadth of their ignorance. But because they deem themselves clever and smart they are closed minded and negating of anything outside the limited church of their knowledge. They profess from their soap boxes in real life and on-line.

There is a related phenomenon, “the not invented here syndrome”. This is when group mind develops a norm, an explanation, a brand or a product. Anything which is not sourced from within that set or peer group is suspect. The brand must be evangelised and cannot tolerate any new ideas which might threaten market share. Ideas from outside of group mind are repelled with boiling oil from the parapets or Winchester rifle rapid fire from within the circled wagons. Nothing foreign and “Apache” can be tolerated and allowed to live. “They” and “we” do not like nor trust “them”.

On an off for over a decade I have had dreams in which I am not believed or listened to. There is not much I can do about that, nor do I feel hard done by. I know enough about human nature to understand that I am a bit of a non sequitur in the minds of many. I don’t make sense in the world of should and ought. For too many the step to “as it actually is” can be tricky.

We have the robes or Levis joke. I say that because of my background and my penchant for black Levis 501 I am not believed. If, however, I wore Buddhist monk’s robes the incredulity would mostly be washed away in a flash of saffron or magenta. It is that simple, people do judge a book by its cover even when they are self-diagnosed omniscient.

Which suggests that said diagnosis is at best premature.

Hmnn…

Dreams and Fate

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

One of the underlying postulates behind my interaction with both my passive nocturnal fully lucid dreams and my interpretation of waking dreaming symbols / omens is that there is such a thing as fate and that dreaming may help one to evolve that fate.

I suspect that this approach is very uncommon amongst those with my scientific training and background in research / higher education. I’ll hazard a guess that I may be perceived as a whacko, a few cards short of a deck and missing a few marbles.

Unlike many who might seek the credibility of scientific experiment and orthodoxy I am unconcerned by this. Several people have called me a mystic. I live a life aside humanity as a married hermit. We don’t get off the compound all that much, only for shopping, medical appointments and the odd walk by the sea or in the countryside. I personally do not think that fMRI will answer questions of Soul. To look for something like that in big ring of magnets with rf probably won’t work.

I know that I can still speak “science”. I was even awarded a quantum optics UK patent fairly recently.

One could comment that I threw it all away. Someone with my privilege should not be living as I do. I might have contributed a whole lot more to UK plc. Maybe I should have done. In the context of fate, maybe it was always my fate to jack it all in. Or maybe I was forced out. Perhaps I was fated to do a series of renunciations in order to learn that what most people cling to, does not need clinging to. I was fated to attain impermanence.

Perhaps I genuinely am a deluded nutcase.

At the moment we have one chronic problem to solve. How can I generate a very small income stream to help pay for a gardener instead of eating into cash reserves? The housing market is constipated here, one solution is to downsize to a manageable plot.

I do not want to work for more than 1 day a week. That work needs to be sedentary and preferably using my bonce. I don’t think that the kind of work I am looking for exists here. I am handicapped by language.

There is an ancillary question.

Am I basically done in this life time or is there anything of significance left for me to do?

Is there any significant fate / karma left?

I have an inkling of some of the things on the cards, these are internal on the compound things.

I am 99.9% sure that I will be unable to manage extended 5 day a week close contact in a working environment. I just won’t be able to hack it.

I had a dream recently suggesting that I need to “get off the bus” and change direction. It seems to be referring to my “outward” LinkedIn journey.

The other themes in my dreams are “somebody else’s mess / cock up” and that “I will not be believed or listened to.”

In a sense if it is my fate not to be believed or listened to, there is little to no point in trying. It is fated thus.

I can’t work off other people’s karmic mess for them. If I am entangled in that karma all I can do is sit tight and not make any more karmic entanglement.

What I could do is try to dream up some more quantum intellectual property. I have doubts as to whether there is a purpose or point to this. It would take a couple of years to grant and several months to read up, research and write. I doubt there is a buck in it for me, as things stand.

I am going to be having a spell as carer soon and perhaps in autumn.

Another recent dream says that the tantra in the Kālacakra has rotated a quarter turn., something has changed.The wheel of time has part turned. I have been putting off delving perhaps the time is now right, this is a change of direction away from the “bus” of social conditioning. The problem with Vajrayana is that things can get weird quickly.

Maybe I need to take a turn around the pond…