Be Strong, Be Wrong

When you put belief-identification before truth bad things happen. A strong soul is one that is not afraid to abandon falsity.

I was trying to figure out what was so painful to watch about this Scott Adams video…

aussie17 @_aussie17

hmm it sounds like Scott Adams made a U-Turn.

Seems like he’s doing the right thing. He’s admitting he was wrong about the covid shots, which shows a certain deference to truth, right?

But there’s a problem here. Actually, a couple.

First, he keeps referring to “winning” and “losing”.

Well, I wasn’t trying to “win” anything, Scott Adams.

This wasn’t a gentlemen’s pistol duel. I was fending off an unprovoked attack against me and everyone I love. Somebody who acts in self-defense isn’t trying to best anyone, or prove anything.

I would rather be wrong and not be attacked, okay?

This my side vs. your side stuff is a dead giveaway that the parties involved really don’t care a lickspittle about the truth. If they did, they would realize there are no “sides” except the fictional ones we invent in our minds; there is only truth, and in an ideal world, we’d all be on one “side”, striving for it together. But alas, here we find ourselves, in this world of My Fiction vs. Your Fiction, with one fiction trying to “win” over the other.

(Side note: my girlfriend remarked to me yesterday that “it feels like we’re not living in reality”. Exactly. Any time we’re on these subjects, we are in the land of make-believe, fighting demons brought into being by insane conjurers.)

Secondly, he persistently uses the labels “vaxxer” and “anti-vaxxer”, which is another huge giveaway, and underlies much of the problem we’ve had throughout the pandemia years.

People think these issues come down to a question of identity.

I am an X, therefore I believe y.

By now, we’ve all heard some people tell us they took their shots because they were “vaxxers” (or worse, because they were “not anti-vaxxers”).

This means that for some people, the confirmation of their identity (or the avoidance of the “villain” identity) is a more important motivator than looking into facts, evidence, listening to arguments, being open to reason, or paying attention to what’s actually going on.

Which serves pharma interests nicely, doesn’t it?

They don’t have to make safe or effective products, or test them adequately, or monitor the results in the aftermath. All they have to do is release… whatever, and praise the people who take the product as having the correct identity, and accuse the refusers of having the wrong identity.

By adopting the identity “vaxxer”, like most identity-labels, it effectively means you’re tying on a blindfold. You’re declaring yourself Uncritical with regards to any pharma product that calls itself by the magic label “Vaccine”.

It doesn’t have to be safe, it doesn’t have to actually protect you against anything, people can be screaming warnings about it—you will not see or hear any of this. You’ve created the mental conditions where such perceptions are impossible. Your adopted identity requires you to be in headlong support of it, come what may.

How many lives have been destroyed by this identity? How many people would still be with us today if they had simply adopted a different identity, or no identity all, other than maybe “truth-seeker” or “critical thinker?” All owing to a mental fiction: I am an X, therefore I believe y.

Christ sake, if this is the outcome then STOP BEING ONE.

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A Mental Fiction With Horrible Consequences

Are you the same thing as your beliefs?

This is what identity means. It means I am identical to it, i.e., the same thing as.

Someone who thinks: “I am an X, therefore I believe…” is declaring they are incapable of changing their beliefs, because, after all, their beliefs are who they are.

Well, if that’s true, what time does Santa Claus deliver gifts to your house on Christmas Eve? Does the Easter Bunny bring you chocolates? When you were born, were you delivered to your family by a stork?

Do you still believe these things?

In fact, we don’t even need to be this absurd.

How about… have you ever confronted an uncomfortable fact which caused you to question something?

Have you ever judged someone, and later realized you were wrong about them?

Have you ever been surprised by something?

Have you ever learned anything?

Have you ever been wrong about something, ever, and been forced to abandon what you believed only a moment prior?

When this happened, did YOU cease to exist?

Obviously, somehow, even though you abandoned a mistaken belief, there is a deeper “you” that persists—an entity capable of discarding untruths when you realize an error in your thinking.

We do not confront the fact that the Easter Bunny might have been a fib told us by our parents or the chocolate manufacturer, and deny any such evidence, and cry: “No! I am an Easter Bunnyist and always will be!!”

And yet, isn’t this exactly what people do? “I’m a vaxxer, so…” “I’m a leftist, so…” “I am a scientist, therefore…”

And this mental fiction sets you in a certain relationship with reality. You’re saying, in effect, I’m putting these lens filters on. I am choosing only to see the part of reality which gets past the filter. The rest is “not me” so I will not see it.

And this is why when you identify with your beliefs (“I AM an x”) you say goodbye to the pursuit of truth.

The act of “thinking” then becomes finding anything that confirms your chosen identity, and denying or blinding yourself to anything that challenges it.

In practice, this usually means going along with whatever the other members of your identity-herd think.

Whatever this is, it is not truth-seeking.

This is why some people will not see facts, evidence, or even consider anything which contradicts their beliefs. To acknowledge such a thing as fact would be to question their own existence, which they will not do.

As Eckhart Tolle puts it:

“Ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life… If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self  is seriously threatened with annihilation. To be wrong is to die.” (The Power of Now, emphasis mine)

To identify with your beliefs is to create a fictitious mental entity, called “My Belief-Identity”, which, like any other entity, will try to avoid non-existence at all costs. Any challenge to your fictitious identity, then, even if it is factually true, is effectively a murder threat.

This is why “misinformation” is seen as a threat. It threatens the mental fiction. Cue the rise of highly partisan, paid “fact-checkers” to keep everything on narrative, and prevent such facts from ever seeing the light of day. Cue the federal agencies dictating to social media companies which people are not allowed to spread facts. Cue the Ministry of Truth.

This is also why you sometimes encounter a defensive person with a compulsive need to be right. If they get proven wrong it will be the same thing as dying. In their mind, they’re not just having a friendly disagreement; they’re fighting for their life.

This is why some people do not want to argue with other people, they want to silence them.. Same reason: they see anyone who is “not US” or who disagrees with their position as a threat to their existence. Therefore, if they have a means of ending that threat, like taking away their platform, or firing them from jobs, or use force to muzzle them in some way, they will not hesitate to use it. (No accident that cancel culture has arisen in concert with obsessive identity-labeling. Such people have created a world filled with Not-US’s, and therefore surrounded themselves with perceived enemies.)

This is why your friends and neighbors now react with hostility when you disagree with them, and why so many relationships have been lost. We used to agree to disagree, in other words, we believed the underlying relationship was more important than agreeing with one another. We saw that there was a deeper person who was not the same as their beliefs, and who mattered to us. Now, people have been trained to see people as just their beliefs, (“oh, you’re just a conspiracy theorist”, “oh, you’re just one of those right-wing extremists“, etc.) and so see disagreement with someone as threatening their existence.

This is why some people have a compulsive need to exercise power over others. The desire to control others, of course, comes from a place of fear and weakness. Every bully (or dictator) is secretly terrified. The exercise of force over others is pre-emptive: everyone is coming to get them, so they better get everyone else first.

This is why we have the Faucis, the Schwabs, the Gates’s, the Soros’s and everyone else in power perpetrating this nonsense on you. All of them ego-identified, weak, terrified of not existing, unable to see facts, unwilling to listen to arguments, eager to silence dissenters, eager to enforce mandates, eager to bend others to their maniacal vision: themselves in power telling everyone else how to behave.

(Also, I have to say, it explains Gates’s extremely inappropriate, awkward, nervous, neurotic demeanor.)

For an excellent discussion of why the tyrants are really seeking “safety”, i.e., their egoic minds are afraid of not existing, see:

My Thoughts on the World Economic Forum

What Strong Souls Do

Thank goodness in this time we’ve also seen some strong, truth-oriented souls. There are many examples, too numerous to list here.

I’ve noticed some things about them.

Truth-oriented people don’t seem to lock themselves into a mental position with identity labels. They’re committed to the truth and such labels will only serve to confine them to a certain way of thinking.

Truth-seeking people go it alone. They realize that truth-fidelity and tribe-fidelity are almost always in conflict. They would rather think for themselves and get somewhere in the quest for truth, rather than sink into a warm bath of belonging and languish in the status quo.

Certainly, they would never go along with some proposed behavior simply to confirm (or deny) their membership in a tribe. They would look into matters for themselves.

Truth-oriented people are not defensive, they are curious. They follow the evidence where it leads.

Truth-oriented people do not attempt to silence those they do not agree with, since disagreements are not threats to them. If the disagreeing person is right, they can learn from them. If they are wrong, they can teach them. Either way, silencing that person robs the truth-seeker (and the world) of potential value.

It doesn’t occur to a truth-oriented person to force anyone to do anything. The only reason to force someone is out of fear, and the truth-oriented person does not fear being challenged, they welcome it.

(But feel free to challenge me on that.😉)

Truth-seekers seem to lean into the places where their knowledge is inadequate, where their explanations seem to break down, where they must challenge themselves to form new beliefs. They push the frontier of what they know (i.e., they strive to learn), which is always a venture into uncertainty, doubt, self-examination, and questioning.

Truth-oriented people do not have a compulsive need to always be right. Since they embrace uncertainty, they also accept the possibility of being wrong. In fact, they welcome being shown where they are wrong, since that only takes them a step away from error, and closer to truth.

See, for example, this discussion by Bret Weinstein on places where he’s been wrong over the last couple years:

Now, can you imagine Anthony “I am the Science” Fauci, for example, ever discussing the ways he has been wrong over the course of the pandemic?

I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.

Bret and I still don’t agree 100% on everything. But here’s the point: if he and I talked, I know the discussion would be fruitful. He would carefully consider what I had to say, and vice versa. Neither of us would be trying to “win” over the other. Neither would be threatened by being proven wrong, and therefore the only outcome of the conversation would be a step closer to the truth for one or both of us.

Truth-seeking people just don’t see things in terms of “my side” and “your side”, winning or losing.

There is only truth, and the obscuring fog which must be egolessly fought through, by all of us, to get to it.

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Be Strong, Be Wrong

There was a punk band I used to listen to as a kid called Nomeansno.

(All right, you got me, I still listen to them—they’re friggin awesome.)

Their defining album was entitled Wrong. This was both a pun on two of the band members’ surnames, the brothers Rob and John Wright (yes, the Wright brothers) but also an exhortation to defy society’s conventions and expectations.

The main lyric became an anthem to us rebellious youngsters:

Be Strong, Be Wrong!

But in the (cough) late summer of my life I have come to understand a deeper, perhaps even a spiritual, meaning to these words.

Being wrong is simply not a threat to a strong, spiritually-centered person.

Indeed, embracing the possibility of being wrong is the only way to move past it, to truth.

So friends, be strong, be wrong.

Hey friend, if you found something of value in this article, will you consider buying James a ko-fi? He’s running low on magic go-go beans…