March 1, 2011

They have twisted the words trivium and trivia


Peace Revolution Podcast lopo

Peace Revolution Podcast # ten – Cognitive Liberty

A Virtual Round-Table Discussion by Brett Veinotte, Jan Irvin, Paul Verge, and Richard Grove


@ 14 min – Brett Veinotte) We talk a lot about language and the power and the weapon that language is and has been, as we looked at its usage in the media, and in the schools, with politicians, and of course even in marketing, in advertising, which people frequently overlook.
But language is a very very powerful weapon in its ability to control how people think.
The word education itself ... Everybody who has been born any time during the late 19th or during the 20th century at all has come to understand that education is a bunch of people who get shut into a building and really not taught, or shoved, or guided through the process of learning how to think. But being very much directed through the process of being told what to think. That's pretty much it.


@ 18 min – Richard Grove) There was an artist in the early 21st century named Mark Lombardi *) and he drew these giant myriads that connected politicians, bankers, people who have these nefarious connections.
He modelled the Vatican Banking Scandal, these sort of things. And through his art you can see the corruption, you can see the connections of the corruption. Unfortunately he died in a very suspicious way on March 22, 2000, shortly before his art was to be displayed at the Whitney Museum, but when you get a hold of his book which has the art in it, produced by Judith Rothschild Foundation, you can see the connections between BCCI and Iran-Contra, and the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, and see all these people have been doing business.
And what I realized in a very harsh way on "9/11" was that my public education, that I have been gone through for approximately 15.000 hours, was not nearly adequate to cover the reality in which I was trying to survive. It was at that point when I decided to, you know, get out of the hamster wheel, stop using my energy to make other people millions and millions of dollars, and to start educating myself, because the money was worthless on "9/11". Didn't matter how much money I then had, I had no clue what's going on. And if I hadn't panicked in getting myself out of that situation, I probably would have died that day.

*) "Dass der Mann kein Verschwörungstheoretiker war, sondern im Gegenteil detektivisch genau recherchierte, beweist die Wirkung seiner Bilder. Ein Journalist des Wall Street Journal, der über die Bush-bin-Laden-Connection recherchierte, soll geschlagene vierzig Minuten vor einer Grafik Lombardis verbracht haben und immer wieder 'Oh, mein Gott' gemurmelt haben." (01/16'04 Süddeutsche Zeitung)


What's really missing from the picture


Brett) I think, a lot of people overlooked the fact, again, through their programming that comes from language, using words like "we" and "us" and "are" to talk about the people who exercise all of this power over their lifes.
What is really missing from the picture when we try to look at the power structures, that for so long people have lived under, we don't really get into the psychology of power. We don't realize or maybe people don't even want to acknowledge that these types of people are fundamentally different from what we call ordinary folks. [...]
The people who supported George Bush don't realize that he has so much more in common with [...] you know, name the world's most tyrants and dictators, that he actually has with the people who are kind of following him along and cheering for him. And the same could be true for Obama or anybody else.
They don't understand that that is a different psychology. Because they have kind of through this collectivism and nationalism just invented connections with these kinds of people.

Bring on the learning revolution

Richard) That's the PR [propaganda] in the education. When you look at a movie like "Jesus Camp" and you see a bunch of people being programmed through religion and then programmed sub religion to support a particular political party, that's the trap we all fall for. And the reason we all created "What you've been missing" is to show that we recognized our own incompetence and we're trying to learn our way past that.
So it's all about everyone is participating, yourself included, we all recognize the inadequacy and the incompetence that we were bringing forward as a function of this public education system.
And when you bring in who supports these parties, if everyone was given full disclosure, nobody would be supporting these people. It's only because of this subversion of our education system, which is a conditioning system, a confirmative system, and the failure of the media, and the failure for everyone who is consuming this media to think critically. Otherwise they couldn't have control over us. At all.

Brett) I think that part of the control through the education system comes down to ...
we talk about the psychology of power, but it's also what's imposed on us through these twelve years, and for many of us it certainly continues into a higher education and then into adulthood through the media for the rest of most people's life. There is a phrase that's used in "What you've been missing" that I really liked and wrote down: "provisional self-esteem". It's because I think that's a powerful and important idea when it comes to education. The foul, the facsimile education.

Paul) Well, provisional self-esteem can also be interpreted as conditional self-esteem. It's essentially giving the power and the dynamic of your self-esteem away to some external source, and only through that external source's adulation or appreciation do you feel good about yourself. So instead of feeling good about yourself because of your own actions and your own achievements you have to give the teacher () or the authority has to prove. And basically what it does, it put you in a submissive position to obey whoever is out there claiming to be an authority. It's a mind set essentially.

You do not talk about


@ 33 min – Brett) I've always said that if you want to prevent somebody from thinking about something critically, if you want to prevent somebody from thinking about something in a logical way, you get them to think about it emotionally. It's a trick that's worked beautifully when it comes to discussion about religion or politics.
People have emotional investments. *)

Jan) Let me jump right in there.
In fact, I remember when I was a kid and a teenager growing up, whenever the subject of politics or religion came up my dad would always say right of the bat: 'Oh, you never talk about religion or politics. Those are two subjects you never talk about it.' And when I look back at that, you know, I always thought that was rather odd.
And looking back, it's because if you talk about it you might just figure out what was going on.

*) Dana calling in on a radio talk show) I'm mad on that guy: Who the hell does he think he is?
You don't talk about religion or politics. I think he's Catholic – what are we gonna to do?
Praying into heaven? I'm very offended. Tell him that he is wrong, wrong, wrong!
[...]
You have to go to purgatory and we have to pray you into heaven? Ist that it?
Jim Gaffigan) Lady, look, the applications for the Third Reich are over, alright?!
Dana) You know what? We have freedom of speech but didn't your mum and dad teach you, there's two things you don't talk about? And that's religion and politics?
And you're on the radio for bump, for god's sake! I'm very offended.
Jim) You are offended? You should watch this movie called "Inherit the Wind", alright?!
Dana) You should watch "Armageddon", okay?!
Jim) Alright. You mean with Bruce Willis?


The third option to fight or flight


37 min – Brett) It's frustrating to watch people who are ... you know, they have this innate brilliance, this genious, they are in so many respects in their own lifes so smart and talented, but when these conversations happen we see this fight-or-flight response, where they either steer around, whatever the issue of discussion is, to attack you on a personal level or they literally sometimes run away, or walk away, or they will try to retreat into this safety zone of 'well, everyone is entire to their opinion, let's change the subject' kind of a thing.
So, that fight-or-flight response is really indicative of an absence of an ability to think logically or critically about whatever the topic is.

Paul Verge) And they are not seeing the third option, they're looking at you as a threat and having that response.
But the third option is a form of non-violent communication, where you're not communicating to them in a sermon or confrontational mode, where you're talking down to them or telling them what to think.
Instead you offer your assessment of the situation and you get them to try to agree with you, which puts them back into a positive wavelength.
It's so much about the trivium in terms of grammar, logic and rhetoric, is not just taking in and understanding information and giving it back out, it is the actual understanding. Understanding tonality, understanding how your language ... the order of the words, the tone of the words, even the subject matter the way you approach somebody completely effects how someone is gonna respond to you. And we are not conscious enough of that because we hear sound bites on TV and we emulate what we watch. [...] that's becoming the new norm for kids as like a new societal slang, but it's a degeneration of language, right?


@ 39 min – Brett) I think that in the past we've done a lot of moralizing. I know I have anyway. When we've talked about things like the principle of non-aggression and using words like "immoral", and boy, that is loaded up for a lot of people emotionally to be told that something that they are supporting is immoral. And I think one of the reasons why that approach has developed – the argument from morality as Stefan Molyneux called it years ago – it's because that's always worked throughout history, right? Like good is the engine, good is the shover, good is the gasoline that takes evil where it needs to go. So, you make these presentations to people – now, at school it's nationalism and patriotism and everybody put their shoulders to the wheel and we're a community, not ever paying any attention to what they're serving or what the goals are down the road or who's making those goals. And of course, it worked beautifully in religion for thousands of years these moral arguments. So I think that historically there is a value to it, being just empirically speaking.
It has worked for thousands of years for the worst kinds of people with the most dangerous ideas. Maybe it would work for some nice folks like us who have, I think, some pretty decent ideas.


They have to suppress the word liberal

@ 63 min – Jan)
It's like the very words "liberal" and "trivium" themselves, because if you look up in any good dictionary the word liberal actually means "of or befitting the free" and it comes from the word "liber", which is also Latin for "book" and where we get words like library and liberty and any liber* word basically. But we're not told by the corporate media, who is seeking to subvert our freedom, that liberals is the antithesis of what they are calling it. And, in fact, antonyms for liberal, which is kind of a funny when we get into these, but antonyms are uneducated, unintellectual, closed off hearts, selfish, narrowed, contracted, mean, small, fascist, rascist, bigoted, homophobic, stingy, close-minded, supportive of monarchies and slavery, against freedom of religious expression and speech, and low in birth and mind, and of course in a free country, it's anti-American.
And the reason why they have done this to the word liberal is because the word liberal is directly related to the seven liberal arts. The seven liberal arts are composed of the trivium and the quadrivium.
The trivium is grammar, logic, and rhetoric in that order, the quadrivium is math, geometry, music and astronomy in that order. And when you have all seven of those that is the liberal or the classical education.
So, they've twisted the words so people don't realize that the word liberal itself is the key to personal and individual freedom. They have to suppress the word liberal to keep people from making that connection. And then the other word is the word trivium.
They trivialized the word trivium and they've made it trivia so that people whenever they hear the word trivium they go: 'Haha that's trivial, that's trivia, I don't need to learn that. That's been debunked, it's 2000 years old, what can I possibly have to benefit by looking at that?!' And these are tactics that they have intentionally put into place to keep people from realizing that freedom is found in the books.

0 comments: