The posts I have been working on here are somewhat in response to some ideas that other substack articles I read recently that have implanted into my mind, such as is my mind, certain reflections, in conjunction with some really absurd ideas I have encountered being proposed by some “on the right” that may actually be on the wrong.
This is sort of a hodgepodge connection to some recent post by Noah Berlatsky, Faye Reid, Lucian Truscott IV, Thom Hartmann, Mary Trump, and the incomparable Rohn Kenyatta, but not exclusively, that have pointed me towards these reflections. What they have been illustrating is a a general theme that makes me keep reflecting that there is an awful lot of nonsense on stilts being thrown into the marketplace of thought; but it’s not something new, but is in fact, the backbone on which much of the structure of the pejoratives that support inconceivable ridiculousness.
As these thoughts have consumed a considerable occupation within my thought patterns, I am subdividing them into shorter posts that are all in some way connected to the general theme of the propagation of these nonsensical beliefs that have long supported these nonsenses.
So you might say these are serialized dramas of mental nonsenses that do need to be taken as a whole that shape the overall reflection of how nonsense has been made sensible for oh so many centuries. But of recent, it is just wiping away some of its own sensibilities.
How Easy It Is To Believe in Nonsense
And the theme that has kept rolling through me and nearly limiting my vocabulary to of late: it’s all so much nonsense on stilts. I don’t know how many of you have tried to walk on stilts, but anyone capable of walking is capable of walking on stilts.
It may appear to be difficult, and it seems like it must really take a great deal of skill and practice. And man, what if you fall, no, let’s leave it to the practiced experts, “I won’t risk doing that” many believe .
Except I always took the risk when it was presented to me. And not at all because I’m a thrill seeker. In fact humans unwilling to take risks are in fact how they are so easily herded into the meekness contrary to Jesus comment, “Feed my sheep”. Feed my sheep is not telling people to become sheep but to take actions to feed them so they are not sheep. Actions, however to do not only include physical risks, but include “mental” risks, the risk of feeding the others to be mental risk takers to not follow the leader off the cliff.
One summer when I was around fifteen, we had made our annual summer’s trip to Indiana. A new family had moved next door to my grandfather. And they had three older girls and a boy around three. When I say older girls, I mean compared to the boy, they ranged fro from ten to thirteen, all younger, than me. And it was the ten year old whom I had noticed walking on stilts.
As I did every summer I would go to my grandfather’s house and work with him in the mornings in his landscaping business. He usually worked until about one, napped for an hour and then went to his factory job where his shift started at three. It was the summer where I wanted to get my Driver’s license, which you could do at 15 in Indiana at that time, and so there was a summer driver’s ed program at Marion High, and I was allowed to enroll. I didn’t think about it at the time, but probably my father had had to pay for my admittance.
The class started almost immediately upon our arrival in Indiana that summer so my grandfather would knock over a few minutes earlier to drop me off at the school. I had already learned to drive a tractor, so the class was a knockoff, it just enabled me to get my license, which a fifteen year old could not obtain without. But the class was only on Mondays thru Thursday.
And so on either the first or second Friday, after our morning work, I returned with my grandfather to his house for his nap.And as we exited the car I noticed the little girl walking along the sidewalk, and for the first time, I noticed her three year old brother tagging along the sidewalk on stilts. His stilts were probably not more than two inches from the ground, but there he was, the three year old boy mastering stilt-walking, not falling, just walking as if it were a natural way to walk.
I beelined straight to the kids (I was all of fifteen, so of course I thought they were kids.)
“How did you learn to do walk on those stilts at your age? You must have been practicing for years.”
The little boy snickered, “Silly,”
“No, we wanted to do it, so my father made us these stilts a couple of months ago,” the girl told me.
“Really? Can I try?”
“Sure.” she descended off the stilts.
“Perhaps, I should go get some shorter ones first, that I first used to learn..”
I was over six feet tall and the stilts she was standing on were over my head. She ran around around their house to their garage and came back with a pair of stilts probably six to eight inches from the ground.
“Watch how I get on and see if you can do it,” she instructed. She tilted the stilts backwards placed the top of the poles under her armpits and then just swung upright as if propelling a swing forward.
The smaller stilts felt a little awkward and I wasn’t sure I would be able to do carbon her motion, but I tried and whoa and behold there I was standing on the stilts.
“Now to walk,” she explained, “Just move the stilt forward with your arms and your leg will follow. It’s more like walking with your arms and just keeping your legs straight. Don’t bend your legs.”
I followed.
“Once you understand the motion, let go of the stilts and just keep on using the motion of your own motion.”
It was so easy that by the time we reached the end of the block I was bored with its simplicity and asked if we count trade stilts.
On the first mounting, I tried to propel myself with a jump, and almost went forward straight onto my face, but I’ve always had exceptional inner ear balance and managed to lean backwards enough to not fall.
“No, no,” she said, “Don’t jump, swing onto the stilts.”
I dismounted and swung upwards and hung on for dear life. It sure did seem spooky with my feet eight feet off the ground, but then I just walked down the street as if I were just walking down the street.
That’s how long it takes to learn to walk on stilts. If you can swing on a swing set and walk on the ground, you can walk on stilts in under five minutes. Her father built me my own pair, and before the end of the summer, the three of us, the little boy now on foot high stilts, we gave a little exhibition at the county fair and afterwards continued to amaze as we walked around the fair on our stilts.
The phrase nonsense on stilts actually comes from Jeremy Bentham in reference to “natural law”. I don’t know if Mr. Bentham actually knew how apropos his comment was. But one of the easiest things that people can do and get people to believe is to throw them out any old nonsense as “truth”.
God created the world? Did he indeed?
Well, it’s here, maybe can we at least be agnostic since we have no proof he didn’t. But I’m not agnostic because we have proof man that man created his gods. But I’m not an atheist because there is no proof there is not something more than we know, some type of “godliness” in the forces of nature that we don’t quite know. Or maybe existence is “god” just because it exists as some panpsychists might profess; or a type of Spinozan panetheism; (not pantheism which is something altogether different, but another possibility.)
But of course you don’t need to use the word; you can use “universal consciousness.” So although I don’t personally believe in gods, and probably not in universal consciousness, I believe in learning to accept what is and adapt to change rather than to force change.
But to adapt is to take a risk; you adapt your physical situation by adapting your mental understanding of the situation. If you lose your leg, you can sit and mope or you can retrain yourself to surviving with one leg. What leads to all nonsense is by attempting to make you feel you are lesser than you were. Feeling lesser by the physical infirmity is only just one type of risk-prevention that is encouraged by those who want to promulgate their own superiority. To become the sheep of the would-be shepherd you have to reorganize his recognition of himself to become a follower and do that you have to train him on the nonsense that he cannot take the mental risk to learn if what he is told (taught) is true.
So we can believe this, or we can believe that, but when we believe we are intelligent enough to know it all, we are spouting nonsense on stilts.
Recently some republicans have suggested a very “logical proof” why black and brown people can’t vote. The constitution says that only the people who were here at its founding were granted citizenship and their descendents are the only citizens. Blacks and Natives therefore cannot be citizens because they were exclusively not granted citizenship by the constitution because they were not under the meaning of those granted citizenship as being “here” at the time of the constitution. (Slaves weren’t even ⅗ here? Natives weren’t here?) Really?
And then of course, what about the fourteenth amendment? Doesn’t that mean a grant to the former slaves of citizenship? Well, no this argument goes, because the fourteenth amendment was itself unconstitutional. Really? Doesn’t the constitution itself say it can be amended?
But let’s run with the argument. Only descendents of those who were declared to be “here” that did not include everyone that was here at the time the constitution went into effect are eligible to vote. My family was here, but they were escaped indentured, so maybe though they were here they weren’t really here, so, let’s disqualify me. Let’s say here does not include indentured who were here or indentured who had fled from their indenturetude, and apparently the descendents of Crispus Attucks or any freed black citizens weren’t here either, even though Attucks was the first American here to be killed in the revolutionary war, if he had any descendents, or brothers or sisters, or even parents, they weren’t here, only Crispus Attucks was here, but then he wasn’t here, was he, because he was the first American to run into British gunfire for the right of the rest to be here, but Mr. Crispus Attucks was no longer here, was he?
But you know who else’s ancestors weren’t here? Well Donald Trump’s weren’t here, Kamala Harris’s weren’t here. Probably not Ron Di Santis’, certainly not Ted Cruz’s; no latino Americans whose lands were later won in a war with Mexico, or anyone who might have been out “there” in the parts bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase, sorry, all you descendents of French ancestors in Louisiana you weren’t here, you don’t get to vote. None of our current Supreme court’s ancestors, with the possible exception of Roberts paternal ancestry, who might have been, but I would presume both sides of one’s ancestry should have had to be here.
But hey, we’ve certainly made citizenship and voting eligibility simple haven’t we? If your ancestors didn’t sign the constitution, hell, you aren’t here. After all they were the only ones really there, in the here of that Philadelphia room that actually made the constitution the law of the land.
Only they didn’t. Luther Martin walked out and threatened revolution by Maryland if they tried to impose it on Maryland (then would be the lead defense attorney in Aaron Burr’s sedition trial.) No one from Rhode Island went to the convention, or signed the constitution, they voted against the constitution—by a popular vote and needed to be blackmailed by an economic boycott to join the union and then with another vote that only a selected committee voted upon. And since the constitution went into effect after only nine states ratified it, the citizens of Virginia (10th), New York (11th) and North Carolina (12th) weren’t here, and have never become citizens. Five of our first six presidents weren’t citizens. Who knew?
Nonsense on stilts. See how easy it is to spout nonsense? Here, not here if you were here, and only those whose families when the constitution went into effect, so that happened after only nine states ratified the constitution to make it effective, so citizens who were there were still there, and not here and no one’s family who was there when there states became states or joined the the union, can’t be included in the here. So why did any others ever join if they could never be eligible to be part of those who had been there?
Gosh, Patrick Henry was right. He became disenfranchised when Virginia ratified the constitution only after the constitution had become the “law of the land.” So Washington, not there, was elected to be president, not as a citizen, but as…well you tell me.
I have no idea how many are going to buy into the argument of being here then, but I imagine someone is going to legitimize the idea because they have learned not to take the risk of the mental flight we just traveled upon to actually recognize the very silliness of it. Okay maybe not that many (hopefully).
Now you don’t need to tell me they are really not even talking about being there then, they are throwing this out as a manner to disenfranchise “blacks and browns.” But it really doesn’t take a great deal of though to realize that the argument they are proposing is not exactly a very solidly coherent enfranchisement of whites because it actually excludes most whites.
But the concept is not meant to be coherent, it is meant to get some whites a methodology of excluding those that they do not want to enfranchise, and all they really need to do is to make the mind into sheep by making others believe there is a rationality to why some should not be permitted to vote. The idea doesn’t need to be rational, no idea needs to be rational, if you make others believe that thinking for themselves is too difficult.
If you can teach them not to pick holes in all rationalities thrown at them by making the risk of thinking too fearful, well then, they simply accept the thought of the leader, lining up one by one behind the Führer or Führerin.
Throw a rope between the lines and tug to pull the other into a chasm between and continue to bury the fallen with the ignorance of the lack of comprehending of the leaders standing on the sidelines roping any they can into their deceptive that they shouldn’t risk thinking.
Of course there is no rationale for enfranchisement, let alone disenfranchisement. If decisions are to be made by a vote, then they can’t be made without voting and the concept of the methodology of voting cannot require anything more than the ability to vote. Else the decision is not voting when anyone must be enfranchised as part of the decision to be made.
To need to be enfranchised is to be qualified, to be qualified is to be selected and enfranchisement is to become an elector, and only those electors are making the decision. And as we all know from our electoral college for president, the decision of who becomes president is not made by voting but by those qualified to make the decision who will become president.
But the ideology of enfranchisement is not just about qualifying or disqualifying the voters, it is about the very concept of the utility of decision making to the denial of that utility. But I am not sure about whether either the utilitarian concept is flawed or the principle of voting is flawed. The idea of the utility is to provide the right action as the one that produces the greatest balance of good over harm for everyone involved. I am not sure whether this greatest balance can be achieved by the slim margins that the results of elections provide–the majority alone cannot provide a balance but can create a great imbalance in the utility for good over harm if close to half feel the result of the outcome of the vote would be more harmful than good.
There are, I suppose, really two methodologies of becoming leaders. One methodology is the king/dictator, or an oligarchic coterie around them, that makes the decisions alone and therefore they must be followed or severe consequences could be imposed on those that reject the leader.
The other methodology would be to select the leader as the one who follows the consensus of the group. James Madison had a great deal of concern (among others) abd worry about the government becoming centered on majorities making decisions, that would create perpetual dissent, And in his farewell address, of course, Washington argued the same thing.
There is a lot of talk about the “wrongness’ of the Citizens United decision, and an outcry that money is not speech. But of course money is speech, it perhaps should not be speech, but it is speech, which is not the same thing. If those believe that those with the most money shouldn’t be able to use money (outside of its capacity of corruption) to contribute more, or “dark money”, are missing the whole point (including the corruption aspect) that money is our primary form of speech, not just in elections, but in totem, as the prompt of our we are told our desires and our thoughts are supposed to be formed.
Are any commercials or advertisements not attempting to buy your desires and retrain your thoughts to desire what they wish you to desire. If your desires can be trained (by money) then your thoughts can be trained to desire money and your desires can these be formulated into misconceptions about the economy of survival into an economy of how do I get more of what I desire rather than desiring what helps us all to achieve utility.
The very manner in which we promote education itself is to force one to desire education to have “more” for oneself than more for the community, or the utility of all. Instead learning should be learning the utility towards balance rather than preferences of selfishness.
Advertising is Big Brother in the flesh of our minds, and the money to advertise is the methodological manner to constantly repeat us into animosities of the greed of mental imbalances. We all, trained to learn what we desire for ourselves, no longer learn to desire what we need for each other. And when this occurs the vote is no longer sensible to express ourselves as to our needs as a community to survive in any type of balance seeking or even capable of considering that my needs are defeated by my selfish desires that no longer consider the needs of others.
Free speech becomes advertised speech and leads to limiting our comprehension by transforming us into obeisance to the wisdom of the leader. When that occurs then voting is not a methodology for seeking the utility of what produces the greatest balance of good over harm for everyone involved. But its not because we have learned selfishness, we have learned to follow whatever the selfish desires of those who are trying to reform us from the risk of recognition of what our real needs are.
There is a gentleman of my acquaintance, a gentleman who lost his job some years ago when his factory shut down, who was raving to me about the stock market growth (under Trump’s administration).
“Don’t you realize that if the stock market increases, others will have less, and if the stock market increases people lose their jobs, prices rise, debts accumulate and you have less?”
“No, no, that’s stupid,” he replies.
Realizing my ignorance, I ask him, “Well how has the stock market going up put more money in your pocket. Explain it to me.”
“Well if the stock market didn’t go up, nobody would have a job, if you knew anything,” was the answer.
Exactly, I don’t know anything, “then why did you lose your job when the stock market went up?”
“Because of Obama.”
Ah yes, of course. “But wasn’t Trump president when you lost your job?’
“Man, you’re too stupid to talk too. It’s because Obama let all those murdering immigrants into the country.”
“And they murdered your boss?”
“Why do always sound so dumb, have you ever listened to yourself?”
Why indeed. Thinking, when it becomes as easy as swinging onto a pair of stilts becomes nonsense because when something is made easy by advertising you from your own thoughts about your own needs, then your thoughts become the nonsense of thoughts that are too easy.
If you can drive across the street, why walk?
If you taught to believe there is always a teacher who can tell you what is the right answer, why expend the effort to learn for yourself? Just follow the algorithm. It’s much easier than actually have to research.
"Can't seem to face up to the facts,
Get so nervous, can't relax.
Can't sleep, bed's on fire,
Don't touch me I'm a real live wire...
and uh, Psycho Killer"
Taken from one of the favorite albums of my youth-1984's "Stop Making Sense" by, of all entities, Talking Heads.
"We're being taken for a ride...again."
Heh, heh.
Stop Making Sense, Stop Making Sense.
OH! The exquisite ironies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r7X3f2gFz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wke3tdWrd3k
Did you get my "sorry"...?