At what level is your own viewpoint currently?

Evidently you can't tell people everything at one time.  You've got to open their eyes gradually (though it gets a little easier once they get to level yellow and they understand that the mainstream news media are not reliable).  So I've devised a scale of enlightenment, or maybe I should call it a scale of paranoia; it's listed below.  Try to gauge your audience, and try to talk at just one level above where you think they are.

reading gurdjieff, ouspensky and colin wilson back in the 60's, helped me understand the phenomenon, especially as it helped explain why emotional alienation was the only existence on offer.

we are surrounded by sleepwalking humans, walking and talking in their dreams, some most convincing in their verisimilitude...

squeezed fearfully into the shrinking gap between internal cognitive dissonance and an external world gone apparently cuckoo, is it any wonder people run for the oblivion of idiotainment?

gurdjieff also pointed out in his teachings that it is better to stay asleep, rather than wake up incompletely, and it takes a special kind of inner strength not to falter and end up between the two, neither here nor there...

i believe that what we don't work out internally, we project onto our reality, so as to see it mirrored.

it's a lot more energetically elegant to do it the first way, but there is so little in the way of durable inner reference points, in the moral black hole caused by bad religion and psychic trauma/abuse, that people are unaware they hold the keys to understanding themselves better, and therefore what they need and therefore want, in their own hands.

presently the most asleep ones are slaves to others agendas.

once we learn to displace negative belief-systems with positive experience of natural feedback loops, (virtuous cycles), then we open the door to allowing much more interesting phenomena to occur, such as telepathy, soul teachers, synergy, and synchrony, (serendipity, if you will).

finding something to love that extends beyond the normal emotional parameters, that allows you to get really visceral, helps enormously to unbox our thinking, i've found.

music, dance and bodysurfing have been especially liberating in this regard.

great diary, have visited all the colours many times...

paranoia is just the modern term for survival instinct. it used to warn us about wooly mammoths, now it's exxon we need to keep our eye on.

people don't like to be woken up, generally...if you take on the job of awakener, you take on some of that person's essence too, and become partly responsible for not leaving them in limbo.

you better have a good new narrative!

if this sounds like 'let them sleep', maybe i'm unsure.

i definitely believe in trying to find a way to get under their sleeping earlids and sounding some kind of (hopefully gentle) alarm, but nature's doing a much better job!

ecology is an ideal precipitating agent, as it's impersonal to most people, and yet needs to (and will) become much more personal indeed.

welcome to ET!

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.

The Authoritarians

It's an online book which attempts to explain the "authoritarian" personality, which actually means someone who follows authoritarian leaders.

The inability to change these people's world view is one of the points of the research.


Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

Yes, I should think orange with a reddish tinge is a fairly broadly-shared level here. With a codicil to the effect that a chunk of the Democratic leadership believes, sincerely or insincerely, that it is not its business to stand up and get in the way.

Sincerely welcome, leftymapfroth!

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

Actually here you are not presenting levels of paranoia but dfferent narratives of the world... reality is much more complex than any single one of this paranoia items...

World is a complex stuff....

But I could have not sum up better the different narratives that we can adopt.... because all of them are in the air... it jsut depends onm your background, vision, etc...although I may add that paranoia level White is basically contrary to facts.. but as you amy not know.. I think reality and facts are mostly irrelevant.

My preferred narrative is not in there.. I would like to change Paranoia Level Orange quite a bit... well a lot... but it would certioanly be my starting point.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

I've been pegged somewhere between red and black for decades, as if anyone didn't know that already...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

I took a whole paragraph out of mine....

(By the way, welcome leftymathprof!)

1.a. Black hole:  Severe greed, severe arrogance, criminal negligence.  In politics, in communications/media, in economics, in business, in health care, in education, in science?....  What area is left, of a milder color of corruption, that we can build on?

1.b. Hell on earth:  continued public apathy about the above.


Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.

Migeru, If you read my posts here and on Kos, you will find a lot of overlap with these ideas, and thanks for the tip on the Overton window . Really interesting. I know Mackinac Island well--my home turf for summer jobs in college.

When I try to place myself on the list, I discover that we are trying to describe a "system"--an ecology-- by a linear metaphor that is essentially short some dimensions. Too bipolar, as is most Western European thinking. (There. THAT ought to get me in trouble properly!)
For example, I think that in the game of power such things as described in paranoia level black result from an insanely complex level of events, processes and targets of opportunity. The great "talent" of people like Cheney and Rumsfeld is to sense, to intuit if you like, the way the current flows, and craft a strategy that achieves their desired result based on this "sense" of flow, by swimming WITH the current, instead of against it.

That said, I'm Black. But with many caveats. To go that way is an admission of failure for the players I see.

The beginning questions we need to ask are:
Who are the players?
What is their desired end state?
Of the pieces of the puzzle that we can sort out and verify, there will be many ways we can assemble them that are plausible- that make sense. One selects among this galaxy of assemblages based on for example historic lessons and definitions of reality, for a crude beginning description. (NOW who's short some dimensions?)
Having done that, I think, to select one of the more stark elements, the detention facilities exist and are a real option, but represent an almost failed end state for the Dick and Don show, a less failed but still undesirable result for the Straussian Theocons, since they think they can pull your strings without recourse to Stalinesque options) and a regrettable but relatively acceptable option for the corporate oligarchs, given continued media control. Since I see these three elements as the real major players, (and for MANY other reasons,), I am quite glad to be several thousand miles away.
And though I think Cheney would regret a martial law scenario with selective detentions, I think he would do it.
I would like to pose a couple questions to the group:

1. Remember how confident Bush was during the last part of what should have been a cliff-hanger election?

2. How many think they will just quietly fade from stage right?

3. Under what circumstances, or set of conditions would the  above players pull the trigger on martial law? ---for our own protection, of course.

Yes, the linear scale is an oversimplification.  But any attempt at a realistic and accurate description of the multidimensional arrangement viewpoints would be way too complicated to have much expository value.  Still, maybe someone can suggest some refinements or adjustments or minor corrections of my linear scale.

What are the key issues?  Sure, global warming and the war are the most obviously massive things in terms of their destructive effects; but those are not the pivotal issues.  To the extent that we can, I would push two issues: (1) Media control.  Once people understand that the media are unreliable, they become more accepting of other revelations.  And (2) Who profits?  My favorite sign for protest demonstrations lately is an enlarged copy of Danziger's cartoon

with his caption "Cost Plus" replaced by my caption: "Who profits from carnage?" ... Actually, I emphasize the profit because that may be understandable at the lower levels, but when you get up to level orange or red you see that they don't care about money so much as control.  If all they wanted was to get rich, they could just stop all the wars, and in a very short time our amazing science and technology would make everyone enormously rich.  Or maybe they're too shortsighted to realize that.  I'm puzzled by their lies about global warming and other assaults on the environment -- the plutocrats are not only killing us common folk, but their own grandchildren too.  I have not understood that yet.

I think we're making gradual progress on waking up people, but I think it's slow; I don't expect that to change substantially anytime soon.  I don't think that the 2008 elections will change things dramatically.  The new president will be someone who is owned by the same power structure that owns Bush.  I can see three possible ways the scenario might change, but I think they're all unlikely: (1) Bush and company have shown a curious mix of great competence and great incompetence; maybe they'll do a lot more really clumsy stuff. (2) The plutocrats don't all cooperate with one another perfectly; their infighting might become vicious enough to be visible. (3) Worst case scenario: Though many of the plutocrats will be satisfied just to make themselves rich and everyone else poor, some of them actually want to inflict more pain.  Alas, they're smart enough so they're only going to follow this course when they think they can get away with it.

Well, this is just speculation, but I guess it is fun in a sort of macabre way.  To keep up my spirits, I've begun to try to memorize concepts that I will retain in prison camp, even after I am stripped of all my possessions.  In the movie "Braveheart", the Mel Gibson character (he loves being tortured, doesn't he) dies shouting "you can take away my life, but you cannot take away my freedom."  But personally I think the best expression of freedom is not a shout, it's a smirk.  So I'm trying to memorize some cheerful songs.  So far, my best candidate is "Always look on the bright side of life."  That's the song sung by the group of people dying slowly by crucifixion at the end of the movie "The Life of Brian."  Once I memorize that song, and the movie scene that goes with it, my cheerfulness will be indestructible.