Barriers to the Truth

efore you implement what we will talk about below, I think it only fair to remind you that if any of your relationships

survive your honesty, you will be in a tiny minority.

Before exposing yourself to this light, it is essential to be aware of the simple fact that when your eyes have adjusted to the brightness of this new world, almost everyone around you will have vanished.

Our theory – our instinctual

knowledge

– is that we will be attacked and reviled for speaking the truth.

If our theory is true, then this is exactly what will happen.

Let me be more specific.

If this theory – and my experience, and the experience of thousands of other people in this philosophical conversation – is true, then you will be attacked and reviled for speaking the truth.

You will be snarled at, dismissed, waved off, condescendingly lectured to, called a fool, a cultist, a traitor, a disinformation agent – angry, paranoid, selfish, ungrateful, deluded, psychotic, insane – and fat, believe it or not!

There will be no end to the vituperation and invective that will be hurled at you.

People live in the darkness, scurrying and biting and gnawing at scraps, and each other – but they have an amazing sensitivity to light – probably because it will reveal their highly unflattering reflections.

When people sense the light of truth approaching, they snarl and growl and attack. They shed all self-restraint, all pretense of dignity, any vestige of

“self-respect.” They attack with lies, with anger, with misrepresentation, with “confusion,” with scorn, with contempt, with eye-rolling – and thankfully, in the end, with ostracism.

They attack with the ferocity of cornered rats because they imagine that the threat comes from you, not from their own hearts.

By odd coincidence, at the very moment that I was writing this section, my podcast show got a new review on PodFeed – the first in months.

Useless moralism (1 star)

By: Daniella

This guy is an inadequate philosopher

and neocheater. His philosophy is religious. What drives him is the quest to be morally pure. All his positions revolve around the quest to keep his hands clean and try to manipulate others to be convinced that he’s a moral authority to be looked upon with awe. He is of no use to society. Don’t bother.

Reviewed on

12/23/2007

I must confess to being quite fascinated by the term

“neocheater,” which I have never heard before! I certainly do agree, of course, that I am no use to “society,” since it is an exploitive lie.

Working with the Facts…

Of course, I am not telling you anything about the people around you that you do not already know.

The truth is such a beautiful, wonderful and liberating thing that if people surrender it to lies

, we know that it must be because they are subjected to the greatest possible duress, the most extreme threats.

We also know that people in societies that are generally more free (i.e. where they are not jailed or killed for criticizing the system) believe almost as many exploitive lies

as those in societies that are less free.

Thus political freedom is not the primary factor in gauging how many lies

people will believe.

Since direct threats of physical destruction or enslavement are not required for people to believe all sorts of horrible moral

lies – indeed, such lies would be impossible if they

required

such threats – there must be another factor that drives the conformity of mankind.

Criminal Slaves

It is a tried and true principle of homicide investigations that when a husband or wife goes missing, the first suspect is always the spouse.

Whenever a crime is committed, look first to those closest to the victim

To unravel the riddle of the enslavement of the many by the few, our first suspects cannot be the masters, but must be the slaves

This we all know deep down.

We know that the truth is a beautiful and liberating thing – a trophy that we hunger for, yearn for, love hopelessly, desperately, at a distance, secretly –

and that we cannot ever speak the truth at all

I am here to tell you that what you fear is all true.

You cannot speak the truth to those around you.

You know

exactly

what they will do to you.

But you do not really

know

this yet – not where it counts, not in the place that will propel you into real action, into real escape, towards

real

freedom!

Dare I say – towards the future



There is only one way to find out whether our fears about speaking the truth are a valid assessment of imminent danger, or rampant and self-indulgent paranoia.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this…