Joonia

“The rich get richer and the poor grow poorer. Yet, from a statistical standpoint, this is recorded as economic progress.”
― John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“The narrator can't be trusted because it has no direct access to the truth of who we really are. It feels as if that voice is the thing that is in control of us; it feels as if that voice is us but it's not.

We, are our neural models. Our narrator is just observing what's happening in the controlled hallucination in our skulls, including our own behavior and explaining it. It's tying all the events together into a coherent tale that tells us who we are; why we're doing what we're doing and feeling what we're feeling. It's helping us feel in control of our thrilling neural show and it's not lying, exactly.

It's confabulating. When we confabulate, we tell a story that is fictional while believing that it is a true story and we're confabulating all the time.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“Deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism ... Repression contributed in a non-trivial to the development of mental illness. And the difference between repression of truth and a lie is a matter of degree, not kind ... It was lies that bred sickness ... Lies warp the structure of being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.

The barely manageable crisis of a parent's terminal illness can be turned, for example, into something awful beyond description by the unseemly and petty squabbling of the sufferers' adult children. Obsessed by the unresolved past, they gather like ghouls around the deathbed forcing tragedy into an unholy dalliance with cowardice and resentment.

He broods in his basement imagining himself oppressed. He fantasizes with delight about the havoc he might wreak on the world that rejected him for his cowardice, awkwardness and inability. And sometimes, he wreaks precisely that havoc and everyone asks why. They could know but refused to.

Any natural weakness or existential challenge, no matter how minor can be magnified into a serious crisis with enough deceit in the individual family or culture. The honest human spirit may continually fail in its attempts to bring about paradise on Earth ... With love, encouragement and character intact, a human being can be resilient beyond imagining.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“It often took me a long time to ferret out the deception.

Sometimes, I was using words for appearance. Sometimes, I was trying to disguise my own true ignorance of the topic at hand. Sometimes, I was using the words of others to avoid the responsibility of thinking for myself.

If you pay attention when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos