This article was first published November 18, 2014, at Philosophers for Change.
The human mind is a marvelous set of formations and
systems. It is the epicenter of consciousness and action. The human mind can
form a unique identity. It can create its own view of the world. Rich
experiences can emerge from its interactions with the world; bedeviled
experiences also can transpire to destroy awakening.
The mind thinks, it feels, it wants, it has the
ability to apprehend truths and suppress errors. It can achieve insights and it
can fabricate prejudices, sabotage its own thinking and chloroform thought.
Both useful truths and harmful misconceptions are the intermixed products of
the human mind. The human mind can easily believe what is false, as well as
what is true.
The human mind has the propensity to see beauty in
right conduct and justify what is flagrantly unethical within bad conduct. It
can love and hate, engineer illusions or confront reality. It can be kind, it
can be cruel. It can advance knowledge, or it can promulgate error. It can be
intellectually humble and honest or intellectually arrogant and perfidious. It
can be empathic or narrow minded. It can be open or it can be closed. It can
achieve a permanent state of expanding knowledge or a deadening, smothering
state of narrowing ignorance and throttled thought. It is said to both
transcend the creatures of lesser ability, while it more than often insults
their innocence and nobility by its ignoble self-deception and repeatedly
unconscious or conscious cruelty.
If these assumptions about the human mind are true,
then the question at issue is: how can humans create within their own minds
such an inconsistent amalgam of the rational and irrational? The answer is
clearly self-deception bred from culture, history, sociology, race, gender,
exploitation and propaganda. The human mind is built on a socially constructed
pyramid of thought.
In fact, perhaps the most accurate and useful
definition of humans is that of 'the self-deceiving mammal'. For deception,
duplicity, sophistry, delusion and hypocrisy are the foundational products of
human nature in its 'natural', primal and untutored state; but it is not
instinctive and subjected to fate. But, rather than reducing these negative
tendencies, most 'schooling' and socio-cultural influences redirect them,
rendering them more sophisticated, more artful, more obscure and more inclined
to deception and illusion.
"One of the most pathetic aspects of human
history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously,
compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims
immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which
leads to death has already begun." ----- Niebuhr Reinhold
To exacerbate this problem, not only are humans
socially constructed to be self-deceptive, they are, in their primal state,
unsurprisingly socio-centric as well. Every culture and society sees itself as
special and as justified in all of its basic beliefs and practices -- in all
its values and taboos. The arbitrary nature of its folkways is known to its
anthropologists (if it has any) but not to its overwhelming majority. Take the
notion of 'American Exceptionalism' as one example.
When we look closely at human decisions and human
behaviors, we can easily see that what counts in contemporary human life is not
who is right, but who is winning; those who possess power in the form of
wealth, property, and weaponry are those who decide what truths will be
trumpeted around the world and what truths will be ridiculed, silenced, or
suppressed.
The corporate mass media of the world generate an
unending superfluity of messages that continually sacrifice truth to 'spin',
knowledge to mere belief and independent thinking to delusional dependent
thinking. When we reach beneath the surface of things, extend our minds beneath
the Orwellian canopy within which we labor and live, we find a world in which
the word 'communicator' and the word 'manipulation' virtually collapse into
simulated synonyms.
The Proficient Manipulators
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society
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There are a small group of people who are skilled in the art of manipulation and control and they use this skill to threaten the survival of the planet and its occupants. These are the Machiavellians, their name taken from the philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, who understood what the ruling elite needed to maintain domination over the mind and thus the material control of the world (https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1943/machiavellians.htm).
These people are shrewdly focused on pursuing their own self-interests without respect to how that pursuit affects others. In fact, others are only prey for their minds and self-interested agendas.
Though they share many of the characteristics of uncritical thinkers, they have extraordinary qualities that separate them from uncritical persons.
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