On the Illusions of Choice and Offense

The Illusion of Choice and Truth; Are You Offended??? SO WHAT!!!
by SonOfTheLawOfOne and Hefficide; members of AboveTopSecret.com
edited by Seraphnb
[http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread877402/pg1]
[http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread877719/pg1]
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You may think it's all conspiracy, or you might not believe it's possible that there are true villains in this world, but "they" are real. In order to have an illusion, you must distort the perception of the viewer. We will be discussing two illusions created between those with power and those without: that of offense and that of choice.

OFFENSE

As is custom in the southeastern United States on summer holidays, I've been busy eating a LOT of barbecue for the past 48 hours. Today was no different. I was invited to, and chose to attend, a family barbecue gathering. Quite a few relatives and family friends, all together, breaking bread and sharing time. A good way to spend a beautiful day. Or so it should have been.

As it happens one of the foods prepared for this event was flame grilled steak. I love steak. In fact my ex and I used to refer to it as "playing steak"... an homage to a bit from the TV show Scrubs. As it happens, I like a bit of ketchup on my steak. It's a personal preference that I never really lost from my childhood. I've had a few folks comment on this. But, until today, never really had anybody get angry over my habit...

I got myself a heaping plate of steak, baked beans, potato salad, fresh bread, and broccoli. Hungry, with the smells of fire cooking over flames, I went to sit down, mouth watering, and stomach growling. Upon sitting down, I placed my plate, drink ( sweetened iced tea! ), and napkin down and began preparing to dig in. Part of this process was to grab the ketchup bottle, from off the table, and to put a small amount on my plate. I don't drown my steak in ketchup... I just add a small bit for flavor enhancement.

And that's when it happened. A member of my family ( who will remain anonymous - as one never knows exactly who might be on ATS - even the person I speak of ) went nuts. "How dare you ruin excellent meat by putting freaking KETCHUP on it! Oh my GOD you are the most selfish and inconsiderate SOB I've never met! I cannot believe that you'd pull something like this!!! This is a total slap in the face of everyone here!!!"

I admit that I froze up. This family member and I have no history of bad blood or ill will. We've always gotten along. So, shocked, I sat there, ketchup bottle in hand, mouth agape, eyes wide... unable to reply.

Then, to my horror... a sort of war erupted, right before my eyes. The family literally broke into two factions, right in front of me, and instantly. Words became harsh, then harshness gave way to screaming. All as I sat there, utterly confused and lost.

Something as benign as ketchup could really take a relatively close family and break it in two??

After awhile the war subsided - but it wasn't resolved. For the rest of the afternoon people were predisposed towards having attitudes and the two distinct "camps" pretty much stayed separated.

Needless to say, when I got home, I rather quickly began to Google terms like "seeking offense", "finding offense in others", and "the psychology of being offended". I found information that not only applies to my little familial ketchup war, but also applies to many conspiracy based issues: Skeptics vs believers? Republicans vs democrats? The "awake" vs the "asleep"? "Blue pill" vs "red pill" thinking? Christians vs Muslims? Theists vs atheists? Check, check, check, check, check, and check. These notions apply to it all.

Let's dig into to some of what the experts, thinkers, and philosophers have to say.

There are people who turn on the radio and get offended because they hear someone speaking in a certain tone or saying a word they don’t like. Some people have a whole list of words that they are offended by, and any time someone says one of them, they go off into a tantrum.

It’s just like allowing someone else’s behavior decide how you are going to be emotionally. You can be the person whose emotions or strings are pulled by someone else, depending on how they choose to act or what words they choose to use.

You choose your own emotional responses, and you own them. You can blame others for how you choose to feel and pretend that you are a victim. Or you can choose not to give anyone permission to take away your happiness, joy or good mood away from you. You can give away your power and allow someone else’s behavior to pull your strings,

If you don’t like what someone is saying on the radio, turn the dial. If you don’t like the way someone chooses to dress, turn your eyes. Don’t feast your eyes on it. If someone else wants to listen to rock music that you think is disgusting, then don’t listen to it. That is what free speech and the First Amendment of the Constitution are about. That’s what free expression is all about. That’s what it’s all about; there is no code that is going to fit everyone.

However, when you come from love you always know what to do and you have consideration, honor, honesty, security, trust, acceptance, integrity, understanding – all those things are love and you cannot be wrong with them. This also means having enough self-love and dignity, not to be burdened with someone else’s victimizing behavior and if need be, allowing them to act that way away from you.

Choosing to not be offended is to not be a victim.

This fairly well sums up my own instinctive thoughts about the whole situation. If I find offense in the behavior of another - behavior that is not intended to directly provoke or harm me - then I'm pretty much basically invalidating the other persons right to choose by trying to impress my own views upon them. I am, essentially, angry that they have the gall to disagree with me. This is the reality of it. This is my own insecurity screaming in my ear... telling me that I cannot be wrong (because I'm smart and always right!) so, therefore, this other person's disagreement must surely be a deliberate act of mocking me.

We all do this, to one degree or another. We react to alien or different thoughts as if they were threats. But why? Could it be that we are all narcissists?

There's the groom who wouldn't let his fiance's overweight friend be a bridesmaid because he didn't want her near him in the wedding pictures. The entrepreneur who launched a meeting for new employees by explaining that nobody ever gets anywhere working for someone else. The woman who had such confidence in her great taste, she routinely redecorated her daughter's home without asking. The guy who found himself so handsome, he took a self-portrait with a Polaroid every night before bed to preserve the moment.

As Ted Turner put it: "If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect."

But narcissism isn't just a combination of monumental self-esteem and rudeness. As a personality type, it ranges from a tendency to a serious clinical disorder, encompassing unexpected, even counterintuitive behavior. The Greek myth of Narcissus ends with the beautiful young man lost to the world, content to forever gaze at his own reflection in a pool of water. Real-life narcissists, however, desperately need other people to validate their own worth. "It's not so much being liked. It's much more important to be admired. Studies have shown narcissists are willing to sacrifice being liked if they think it's necessary to be admired," says Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Deep desire to be at the center of things is served by extreme self-confidence, a combination that makes narcissists attractive and even charming. Buoyed by a coterie of admiring friends and associates—protected by the armor of positive self-regard—someone with a mild-to-moderate case of narcissism can float through life feeling pretty good about himself. Since they feel entitled to special treatment, they are easily offended, and readily harbor grudges. Yet narcissists are often very popular—at least in the short term.

The beauty of being a narcissist is that even when disaster stares you in the face, you feel neither doubt nor remorse. In a study, researchers asked a pair of participants to undertake a task that was rigged to fail. Most people tend to protect their partner, sharing either the credit or the blame. "But the narcissists would say, 'It's totally the other person's fault.' They're completely willing to step on someone," says narcissism researcher Keith Campbell, associate professor of social psychology at the University of Georgia.

Hotchkiss' seven deadly sins of narcissism are:
1) Shamelessness: Shame is the feeling that lurks beneath all unhealthy narcissism, and the inability to process shame in healthy ways.
2) Magical thinking: Narcissists see themselves as perfect, using distortion and illusion known as magical thinking. They also use projection to dump shame onto others.
3) Arrogance: A narcissist who is feeling deflated may reinflate by diminishing, debasing, or degrading somebody else.
4) Envy: A narcissist may secure a sense of superiority in the face of another person's ability by using contempt to minimize the other person.
5) Entitlement: Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves special. Failure to comply is considered an attack on their superiority, and the perpetrator is considered an "awkward" or "difficult" person. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger narcissistic rage.
6) Exploitation: Can take many forms but always involves the exploitation of others without regard for their feelings or interests. Often the other is in a subservient position where resistance would be difficult or even impossible. Sometimes the subservience is not so much real as assumed.
7) Bad boundaries: Narcissists do not recognize that they have boundaries and that others are separate and are not extensions of themselves. Others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all. Those who provide narcissistic supply to the narcissist are treated as if they are part of the narcissist and are expected to live up to those expectations. In the mind of a narcissist there is no boundary between self and other.

Well, all that seems to fit! But there is no way that the vast majority of an entire culture could be suffering from the same mental health issue, so there has to be another explanation for our self-assured and easily offended natures. Could it be cultural narcissism? Literally a mass delusion?

In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch defines a narcissistic culture as one where every activity and relationship is defined by the hedonistic need to acquire the symbols of wealth, this becoming the only expression of rigid, yet covert, social hierarchies. It is a culture where liberalism only exists insofar as it serves a consumer society, and even art, sex and religion lose their liberating power.

In such a society of constant competition, there can be no allies, and little transparency. The threats to acquisitions of social symbols are so numerous, varied and frequently incomprehensible, that defensiveness, as well as competitiveness, becomes a way of life. Any real sense of community is undermined—or even destroyed—to be replaced by virtual equivalents that strive, unsuccessfully, to synthesize a sense of community.

Synthetic sense of community? Hedonistic need to acquire the symbols of wealth? We stumbling into chilling stuff here, but look around you. Analyze it all. Does what you see match up to this cold, sobering assessment of society?

Narcissism, or excessive self-love, is marked by bloated confidence, vanity, materialism, and a lack of consideration for others. Yet narcissistic personality traits have become so pervasive in American culture that they threaten to transform us into a nation of egomaniacs, research psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell say in their book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.

Twenge and her team at San Diego State University also report today in a study that narcissism continues to spread quickly among college students, especially young women. Considering how cultural influences on girls have changed in the past decade, that's not surprising, says Twenge. Plastic surgery rates have jumped since the 1990s, and materialism is increasingly being emphasized in song lyrics, for example, she says.

Song lyrics? Could media be telling us to be shallow, closed minded narcissists? You bet. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONXpaBQnBvE]

Why would the media and the folks who control it, want us all to be narcissists? What purpose does that serve? Well, of course, the answer is divide et impera- divide and conquer. In short, making us all self-absorbed and intolerant means that we can never unite, agree, or stand up for the common good. Fragmentation is key to global domination.

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country." - Raymond Chandler

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism, and religious dogmas." - Brock Chisholm, U.N. W.H.O. Director

“We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood.” - Dr Carl Rogers, A.P.A. Former President

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." - David Rockefeller

So, friends and denizens of the Internet. I have given it to you bluntly and clearly: We are at war, and this is one of the primary weapons that is being used against us. We've been trained to see only ourselves and to dismiss and even hate those who do not serve as literal mirrors for our own thoughts.

We have been divided; we are being conquered; we are all complicit and guilty in our own rights. Every single time we argue, instead of discussing, we sell our own freedoms away. Every time we hold true to our own dogmatic predispositions, out of emotion and personal bias? We close the cage door and lock ourselves in.

United we might stand. But divided we don't stand a chance at all. Quit looking for offense folks. You're going to find it. And, in doing so, you will lose the war.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxgRUyzgs0]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guF4Av4sIgg]

The hour is growing late for us. The people with agendas have been at their game for a very long time now, and they are brilliantly skilled at what they do. They've fragmented us with illusory choices and the right of self definition. They've taught us to rabidly defend ourselves and our opinions. They've taught us that it's okay to hate, as long as you hate for the right reasons. They've created labels for us, so that we can feel wanted, and then used those labels to enslave us to dogma and paradigm. It's time for us all to wake up and to realize that our first, primary, and ONLY relevant label is "human" and that the rest, be they political, religious, nationalist, philosophical, or otherwise, are all just smoke screens designed to make us slaves.

So, if you're offended? SO WHAT?! Sadly, and ironically, I say, "Let the fighting begin..."

CHOICE

There are 3 types of choices:
1) Hobson’s Choice, a free choice in which only one option is offered (i.e. “take it or leave it”)
2) Morton’s Fork, a choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives (in other words, a dilemma) or two lines of reasoning that lead to the same unpleasant conclusion (i.e., “between the devil and the deep blue sea” or “between a rock and a hard place”)
3) Buridan’s Ass, an illustration of a paradox in philosophy in the conception of free will. It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other. The paradox is named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirizes.

Left, Right; Democrat, Republican; it is all an illusion of choice. As long as you BELIEVE you have a choice, you will never revolt (Hobson's Choice), even if the choice is between two horrible things (Morton's Fork), because you'd rather choose something than choose nothing and suffer from the pain of not choosing anything at all (Buridan's Ass).

Thinking "outside of the box" is knowing that you are not limited to the choices presented to you. This is where you can make a difference.

There are well understood aspects of human psychology that show how easy it is to create the illusion of something being true. You see it everyday of your life, but hopefully, this will help you understand WHY.

The idea that the concept that's easy to understand is true is what psychologists call the illusion of truth effect. It arises at least partly because familiarity breeds liking. As we are exposed to a message again and again, it becomes more familiar. Because of the way our minds work, what is familiar is also true. Familiar things require less effort to process and that feeling of ease unconsciously signals truth, an effect that is called cognitive fluency.

As every politician knows, there's not much difference between actual truth and the illusion of truth. Since illusions are often easier to produce, why bother with the truth? However, the exact opposite is what is true.

In other words, it's no good repeating a weak argument to people who are listening carefully. But if people aren't motivated to scrutinise your arguments carefully then repeat away with abandon—the audience will find the argument more familiar and, therefore, more persuasive.

This suggests we should remain critical while watching TV adverts or the message will creep in under our defences. You might think it's better to let the ads wash over you, without thinking too much, but just the reverse is true. Really we should be highly critical otherwise, before we know it, we're singing the jingle, quoting the tag-line and buying the product.

When the argument is strong, though, it doesn't matter whether or not the audience is concentrating hard, repetition will increase persuasion. Unfortunately I find it's often people with the best arguments who don't repeat them enough.

We NEED to stop fighting over the illusions that "they" want us to believe!!! As long as we fight amongst ourselves, and the ILLUSIONS, "THEY" WIN and we continue to be their pawns and slaves!

We need to stop bickering over the illusion of truth and start looking at why we are only being given those choices! We can make real change. It has to start somewhere.