At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice. True wisdom is to know the extent of what you know as well as what you “don’t” know.
When you control public opinion, as corporate conglomerate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, (and nowadays social media), you can lead the masses toward believing almost anything you want, and guide them as you please. Tell a lie over and over enough times and it becomes fact, since fact is nothing more than consensus of opinion with barely a grain of truth necessary to be promoted as a fact and approved by those who control public opinion to be disseminated to the public as factual and true.
The corporate conglomerate grip on public opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media (and social media) all objectivity…much less dissent.
It does not actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American political ruling class is that it has been able to make voters think that they actually have something to do with electing of presidents for the past 200 years when, in fact, voters have had little to say about the presidential candidates chosen to run for office by the political parties, or the congressional and executive branch policies legislated, or the way the country is run in general by Democrats and Republicans. We need to consider having more political parties to, hopefully, hold the two current political parties accountable. For example, maybe consider carving the Democrat Party into Social Democrats and Christian Democrats and even more parties than this if necessary to get fair representation of voter needs and values.
Current control of public opinion by corporate conglomerates and the essentially two-Party political system is like having an electronic cage around the nation which too often blocks too much dissenting information from getting to the masses. It makes no difference who you vote for – the two dominating political parties are really one party representing truly only 4% of the people at the top.
Politics is made up of two words: “Poli,” which is Greek for “many,” and “tics,” which are bloodsucking insects. Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning. We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
There are a great many people who have a vested interest in maintaining the stupidity of the American public. You know, I’ve been around the ruling class all my life, and I’ve been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country they preside over.
Our political and corporate conglomerate rulers, for more than a century since 1900, have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that they do to other people, not to mention our own. If you are a critic of the political and corporate rulers of the United States, you are either demonized, or you are trivialized by the news media they control and, believe me, they do a very good job of making you into a non-person or a ridiculous person.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying especially since reality is something the human race does not handle very well. Since no one can ever know for certain whether or not his own view of life is the correct one, it is absolutely impossible for him to know if someone else’s view is the wrong view.
The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for ‘root.’ Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical. It is no accident that the word radical has now been totally demonized just like calling someone a cynic when a cynic is actually only trying to make things better.
And if you are called a sophisticate, well, you may be well read and knowledgeable but the word ‘sophist’ in Latin means telling anyone anything to persuade them to believe you because the end always justifies the means. In the ancient philosopher Plato’s search for truth, he was always having to battle the sophisticates in his search for truth. Equate the unethical lawyers of today with sophisticates, against those of us like Plato who are ethical and seek truth. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate.
Moreover, I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam – good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as an ethical and educational system like Confucianism which is not a religion.
On another note, there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homosexual or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCE: INDEPENDENT THINKER, GORE VIDAL 1925-2011