SIGNED BY AUTHOR

"Unmask Your Mind

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. " — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Incredulity is not an argument. Ignorance is not a defense. We’re all being lied to with carefully crafted logically fallacious narratives. News belief is the new religious belief.

Mass media has supplanted religion as the primary unifying myth builder and worldview shaper. It’s far more centralized and monolithic than the unquestioning believers would suspect. What appears as pandemonium is a singular vision describing and surreptitiously imposing the accepted, consensus version of reality.

Agreeing with the consensus is not the same thing as being correct but it’s hard to tell since questioning it is considered tantamount to hate. I am surprised question marks haven’t been banned, removed from keyboards altogether, or confiscated by UN troops by now.

The refusal to look and to see that there is a discrepancy between the televised version of the world and the real thing is moral cowardice. It’s not difficult to entertain the hypothetical question “what if?” The much-maligned skeptics have a point. Refusing to use reason and logic to critically examine a belief is an abnegation of one's responsibility to think.

It’s often easier to go with the hive and that’s the primary issue here. The mass-mediated minds are separated by worldview from the so-called “conspiracy theorists” who are targeted by believers with endless vitriol, scapegoating, and shame. Every religion has an in-built prejudice against non-members. The mainstream media has made its attitude toward non-believers clear. Believers and non-believers have different frames of reference that shape how they see others, themselves, and our place in the universe.

There is nothing to stop one from embracing illogical ideas. We are entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts. Religious belief generally serves a higher purpose and necessarily deals with the unknown and that which is unknowable from the natural world. The supernatural has a place in religious and spiritual belief systems.

Faith in media, however dangerously misplaced, is demanded from viewers. Rationally parsing the facts is labeled conspiracy theorizing and is sternly frowned upon. It is only reasonable to drop the presumption that news believers have the moral or intellectual high ground. Believers lack objective and authentic evidence. They fall for the biggest lies and the fakest news events because they are convinced by inauthentic evidence, hearsay, and rumor enforced by a monolithic world-spanning echo chamber.

The consensus reality I call the World Stage has no place for non-believers, those that know something is not quite right and it goes behind left versus right partisan squabbling.

Our minds have been hoodwinked. We unwittingly donned masks to prevent us from recognizing that mass media is not what we are led to assume. Strip away the unverifiable, the lies, and the fallacies and you’re left with a less-than-complete story and nothing to fill in the gaps. The falsification of fake news is just the first step. The next step is to deal with the questions this raises.

When reality and beliefs clash, internal disharmony results. I posit this cognitive dissonance is an unavoidable side effect of outsourcing one’s critical thinking faculties and most avoid the truth because it literally hurts. In Plato’s Allegory of The Cave, he posits that the reason most don’t leave the “cave” of ignorance is the pain of seeing the blinding light of truth: